Happiness Comes Before Success

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The fact that happiness comes before success has now been decided with research by Shawn Acor, published in his book The Happiness Advantage.

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Happiness Comes Before Success

The realisation that happiness comes before success puts both happiness and success in their rightful places. This seems intuitively right but not the sort of thing that success driven people would care to believe. However, the work by Shawn Achor, who studies Positive Psychology and happiness at Harvard have given the evidence to back this up, which has been published in his book 'The Happiness Advantage. This work began by looking at business success, but has shown that the results apply equally to success in all areas of life, and that happiness gives you the edge in doing whatever to want to be successful at. It also lays to rest the idea that happy people can't also be successful. Happiness helps you perform better, make more intelligent decisions, be more creative and more productive. In the race for success it is important to realize that happy people have an unfair advantage.

Introduction To 'The Happiness Advantage' By Shawn Acor

If you observe the people around you, you'll find most individuals follow a formula that has been subtly taught to them by their schools, their company, their parents, or society. That is: If you work hard, you will become successful, and once you become successful, then you'll be happy. This pattern of belief explains what most often motivates us in life. We think: If I just get that raise, or hit the next sales target, I'll be happy. If I can just get that next good grade, I'll be happy. If I lose that five pounds, I'll be happy. And so on. Success first, happiness second.

The only problem is that this formula is broken.

If success causes happiness, then every employee who gets a promotion, every student who receives an acceptance letter, everyone who has ever accomplished a goal of any kind should be happy. But with each victory, our goalposts of success keep getting pushed further and further out, so that happiness gets pushed over the horizon.

Even more important, the formula is broken because it is backward. More than a decade of groundbreaking research in the fields of positive psychology and neuroscience has proven in no uncertain terms that the relationship between success and happiness works the other way round. Thanks to this cutting edge science, we now know that happiness is the precursor to success, not merely the results. And that happiness and optimism actually fuel performance and achievement - giving us the competitive edge that I call the The Happiness Advantage.

Waiting to be happy limits our brains potential for success, whereas cultivating positive brains makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative and productive, which drives performance upwards. This discovery has been confirmed by thousands of scientific studies and my own work and research on 1,600 Harvard students and dozens of Fortune 500 companies worldwide. In this book, you will learn not only why the The Happiness Advantage is so powerful, but how you can use it on a daily basis to increase your success at work.

The 7 Principles Of Success

The Happiness Advantage. Happiness increases your chance of success.
The Fulcrum And The Lever. The way you think about your job is important. Reframe.
The Tetris Effect. Think positive.
Falling Up. Use failure to fuel success.
The Zorro Circle. Focus on small goals.
The 20 Second Rule. Use little things to help you change habits.
Social Investment. Social support is important, especially when under pressure.