The 7 Principles in The Happiness Advantage

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform book guide to "The Happiness Advantage" by Shawn Achor. Shortform has the world's best summaries and analyses of books you should be reading.

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What are the 7 principles from The Happiness Advantage? What benefits can they bring to your life?

In The Happiness Advantage, 7 principles for positivity and happiness are introduced. Following these 7 principles will improve your mindset, relationships, career, and more.

Learn about the 7 principles from The Happiness Advantage and their benefits below.

The Happiness Advantage: 7 Principles for Success

In The Happiness Advantage, 7 principles for happiness and success are introduced, based on Shawn Achor’s research and personal anecdotes.

Here’s an in-depth look at each of The Happiness Advantage 7 principles for success:

Principle #1: Reap the Benefits of Happiness

The first of the 7 principles introduced in The Happiness Advantage covers how to reap the benefits of happiness. The benefits of being happy are deeper than feeling good—happiness has measurable, lasting effects on your mind and body:

Positive emotions release dopamine and serotonin, which make you feel good while also activating your brain’s learning centers. This effect improves your ability to think quickly and creatively, analyze, problem-solve, organize and store new information, and be open to new ideas.
Positive emotions also reduce stress and anxiety in a phenomenon psychologists call “the undoing effect.” Some amount of stress is inevitable in life and in work, but when a stressful situation is imminent—for example, you have to make a presentation at an important meeting this afternoon—you can mitigate that stress by focusing on happy memories or watching a funny video.
Happiness improves your physical health. In one experiment, researchers surveyed participants about their levels of happiness, and then injected them with the cold virus. The following week, researchers found that the happier participants fought off the virus more quickly and had fewer objective symptoms than their less happy peers.

Your happiness fluctuates all the time, but you can actually take steps to permanently raise your happiness baseline. Consider incorporating some of these happiness-building activities into your day-to-day routine:

Meditating: Five minutes of meditation a day can make you more calm and aware, and, in the long term, permanently rewire your brain for greater happiness, boost your immune system, and lower your stress.
Building up positive anticipation: Getting excited about an upcoming event activates your brain’s pleasure centers as much as actually having the experience. Think about experiences you’re looking forward to, and make plans that you can get excited about.
Giving back: People who perform acts of kindness are much happier than people who don’t. One day each week, try to perform five acts of kindness—they can be small and simple, but they should be deliberate.
Cultivating a positive environment: Your surroundings impact your mindset, so fill yours with things that make you happy, such as pictures of loved ones.
Exercising: Exercise releases feel-good endorphins in your brain, increases motivation, reduces stress and anxiety, and promotes focus.
Investing in experiences: Spending money on activities (such as musical events and group dinners) or on other people creates more meaningful and enduring happiness than spending money on yourself.
Tapping into your talents: Using a skill that you excel at or making the most of an ingrained character trait (such as a love of learning) can lower depression and increase happiness.

The cognitive, emotional, and physical benefits of positivity mean that it also promotes productivity and success at work: Happy employees are more focused and innovative, suffer from less stress, and call out for fewer sick days. Managers and executives are in the best position to promote happiness because they can influence company policies and culture, they interact with many people, and they set an example for their employees. Company leaders can make their employees happier and more productive by:

Providing services such as health benefits, gym memberships, and on-site daycare.
Frequently recognizing and encouraging employees’ good work. This can be as simple as a “well done” email or a brief recognition at the end of a meeting. In fact, scientists have determined that employees perform best when they hear three to six positive comments for every negative comment.

Principle #2: Leverage the Power of a Positive Mindset

Sometimes, the biggest obstacles to happiness and success are your own persistent, negative thoughts. Your mindset strongly impacts your perceptions, efforts, and actions, and you can leverage it to achieve happiness and success. You can’t be sad and happy at the same time: Your brain has a limited capacity to process the many aspects of your experiences and surroundings, so it filters your awareness through a positive or negative lens. This choice dictates your perception of the world, and perception defines your reality.

Your mindset also impacts your work performance—for example, you can alter your perspective of tedious, daily tasks to increase your engagement and motivation. If you’re dreading a meeting that you perceive as a waste of time, find something you can gain from the experience: Maybe it’s an opportunity to observe your manager’s leadership style or to practice your active listening skills.

Let’s examine three ways in which you can improve your mindset to raise your performance:

Believe in your ability. Research shows that an employee’s confidence of her own ability to perform her job well is a better predictor of her actual job performance than her training or skill level. Be confident in your skills and talents.
Believe in your ability to improve. People with a “fixed mindset” believe that their skills and capabilities are immutable, which leads to underperformance. By contrast, people with a “growth mindset” understand that exerting effort will lead to improvement, which leads to greater motivation, more effort, and, ultimately, better results.
Reframe how you think about work. When you view your work as a calling—no matter what it is—you recognize its innate value, the unique skills you bring to it, and how it promotes your personal life goals (even in small, subtle ways).

Not only can your mindset impact your own outcome, but believing in someone else’s potential can actually help manifest that success. This phenomenon—known as the Pygmalion Effect—is evident in workspaces: Research shows that if a manager believes employees are internally motivated (and not just in it for the paycheck), the workers’ outcomes improve. Managers and other leaders who understand this power invest in the company’s success when they can look at every interaction with colleagues and employees as an opportunity to recognize their skills, encourage them, and promote positivity.

Principle #3: Train Your Brain to See the Positive

In order to reap the wide-ranging benefits of happiness and a positive mindset, how do you train your brain to focus on the positive instead of the negative? Your brain’s filter works as well as your email’s spam filter: Sometimes it tosses aside important information, and you have to reprogram it. When you develop a negative thought pattern, not only are you focusing on the negative, but you’re actively not seeing the positive. By contrast, when you implement a positive thinking pattern, you’ll be more likely to notice and capitalize on opportunities, which will contribute to your success, reinforcing your positivity and creating a virtuous cycle. A positive thinking pattern raises your:

Happiness, which brings the performance advantages we’ve talked about
Gratitude, which raises your emotional intelligence, energy, and capacity to forgive, while lowering anxiety, loneliness, and depression
Optimism, which makes you inclined to set more ambitious goals, work harder to achieve those goals, persevere when facing obstacles, and be better able to manage stress and overcome challenges

Mental exercises can reprogram your brain to notice positive scenarios and opportunities. In order to train your brain to see the positive, try one of these strategies:

Every day, take five minutes to write a list of three things in your life that make you happy or grateful.
Three times a week, spend 20 minutes writing about a positive experience.

The goal of a positive thinking pattern is not to have irrational optimism or turn a blind eye to problems that need improvement. Rather, by adding a positive tint to your view of the world, you can maintain awareness of problems and concerns, while choosing to prioritize a positive perspective. In other words, recognizing and having gratitude for the good in your life is actually the best mechanism for creating more positive outcomes.

Principle #4: Learn and Grow Through Adversity

As much as you may be able to improve your positive mindset, it can be particularly difficult to be optimistic in the face of adversity. When you confront a challenge, you have three options:

Keep circling around the problem, which will result in no change.
Make bad choices that create further negative consequences, thereby putting you in an even worse position than before.
Take the setback as an opportunity to build resilience, improve your abilities, and increase your fortitude. This is the Third Path, or the act of “falling up.”

Adversity is inevitable, but, if you stay positive during challenging times, you will not only carry on, but also learn and grow through the process. Instead of seeing failure as something to avoid or endure, when you learn to fall up, failure becomes an invaluable opportunity for growth. Many companies and organizations highly value failing early and often because those failures provide opportunities to learn before investing too heavily in a particular model, project, or approach.

In order to find a way to fall up, look at adversity as a building block for your personal growth, rather than an obstacle in your path. To change your mindset, examine it:

What counterfacts do you use? A counterfact is a hypothetical alternative scenario that you use to frame reality. For example, if you get shot in the arm, your counterfact determines whether you consider yourself unlucky for getting shot or lucky for not having been shot in the head. You have the power to create your counterfact—a counterfact that encourages positivity brings the motivation and performance benefits that we’ve discussed, while a negative one distorts your perspective to make obstacles seem greater than they actually are.
What is your explanatory style, or the way in which you make sense of a challenging event? People with an optimistic explanatory style view adversity as specific and temporary, while people with a pessimistic one view adversity as widespread and permanent (this view leads to learned helplessness).

The 7 Principles in The Happiness Advantage