Shawn Achor shares a lot of insights around some interesting factors that we neglect and perhaps we should not, like the dangers of measuring the average, because, that’s exactly what we are going to get: the average, instead of excellence. We should all move the entire average up, so that we do not focus on our current average alone.
| The happy secret to better work | Shawn Achor |
To become better at what we do and to become better at who we are, we need to focus on the lens which the brain sees the world and change that lens so that we would also be capable of changing reality, our reality. That way, by shifting that focus, we will have a great, unprecedented, opportunity to change our happiness, our education, our business. Anything. And everything.
Find A Way To Become Positive In The Present
We need to shift gears into changing, or even better, reverting the formula for happiness and success with a rather simple equation: focus on the positive and not on the negative. We should go away, slowly, but steadily, from the mantra: ‘If I work harder I will be more successful, if I am more successful I am happier.’
More than anything else because every time our brain hits success, we already get to change automatically that goal of success, meaning it’s already embarking on to the next piece of success. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success we will never reach that state of happiness. Push happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society.
We should be focusing on raising everyone’s level of positivity in the present, so that the brain experiences a happiness advantage. Meaning that if our brain is positive it will perform significantly better than thinking neutral or negatively
So essentially, what we would need to do in both our work and personal lives, is to find a way to become positive in the present, then our brains will work even more successfully. Doing so it will make us all happier, but it would also turn on all our learning centers in our brain allowing us to adapt to the world in a different way and better.
Start Creating Lasting Positive Change
Shawn proclaims that when thinking about small changes rippling outward we could surely start creating lasting positive change with a good number of very simple, yet, incredibly powerful, things to consider, which are:
- 3 Gratitudes
- Journaling
- Exercise
- Meditation
- Random Acts of Kindness
By doing that not only would we be creating ripples of positivity, but eventually we would be creating a real revolution that we can all relate to and feel even more attached, engaged, and committed to providing us all with much better-quality lives, lives where fulfillment and happiness rule big time altogether over everything else! And that’s just such a fine feeling.
Every time our brain has a success, we just change the goalpost of what success looked like. We get good grades, now we must get better grades, we get into a good school and after we get into a better one, we get a good job, now we must get a better job, we hit our sales target, we’re going to change it. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, our brain never gets there. We’ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon, as a society. And that’s because we think we must be successful, then we’ll be happier.
Journaling about our positive experience over the past 24 hours allows our brain to relive it. Exercise teaches our brain that our behavior matters. We find that meditation allows our brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we’ve been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand.
