Book review: The Happiness Advantage
“In this book, you will learn, not only why the Happiness Advantage is so powerful, but how you can use it on a daily basis to increase your success at work.”
At the beginning of the year, I decided to plan my year for 2021. I set many goals and one of them was to read 12 books in 2021. This might be an easy task for many people, but it is actually a challenge for me. I get my information mainly from researches and podcasts. I know that the depth of a book might not be found in any of these sources, and this is why I decided to invest my time in books.
The idea isn’t to only read business books, but to read books I might find interesting (novels can be some of them as well). Yesterday I finished my first book, almost 1 week ahead of schedule! The book was “The Happiness Advantage” and I highly recommend it! Just so you know how much I liked it, the notes that I decided to take while reading ended up being a 13pg document! I’m sure I’ll read the notes over and over again.
The way Shawn Achor wrote was very light and I even found it funny sometimes! He doesn’t try to teach us what happiness actually means, instead he shows us, with science, all the benefits of being happy. In his own words, “success orbits around happiness”.
“Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it is the realization that we can.”
In my opinion, many people are skeptical about happiness. They believe that being happy means having no problems nor challenges to face. It is almost as being happy is a Disney movie! However, even in Disney movies, before the “happily ever after” the main characters have to face challenges and disagreements. Life is almost the same.
The main lesson I took from the book wasn’t that, in order to be happy, we should be always smiling and singing happy songs, but we should revisit how we face our challenges and, most importantly, which lesson we take from them.
“I started to realize just how much our interpretation of reality changes our experience of that reality.”
Shawn Achor spends most of the book explaining 7 principles:
1- The happiness advantage: even though each one of us has a different view of what happiness means, it is important to highlight that happiness is a competitive advantage for you and for your company
2- The fulcrum and the lever: even though we cannot change the reality with our minds and our will, we can “teach” our brain how we want to see the current reality and change how we react to it
3- The Tetris effect: our brains are trained to work and, unfortunately, it is usually trained to see the negative side of everything. We should train our brains to see the negative, but focus and cultivate optimism and the positive side of the situations
4- Falling-up: finding opportunities on adversities and failures
5- The Zorro circle: small achievements can sum up to be a huge change in our lives, giving us the sense we are always in control of the situations
6- The 20-Second rule: transform bad habits into good ones by reducing the obstacles for the changes
7- Social Investment: invest in our social network is critical for our success and our failures, being present in good and bad moments
If you think about them individually, they make a lot of sense. However, the magic happens when you put them to work together! It is also the most challenging part of the principles.
Just knowing the theory is not enough, we have to put it into practice. We have to work to be happy and, even with all the work we can have, we are not going to be happy all the time. It is challenging to be happy, but I, and Shawn Achor, assure you that the reward is worth it!
“You can study gravity forever without learning how to fly.”
