Shawn Achor
Shawn Achor
Shawn Achor is an American happiness researcher, author, and speaker known for his advocacy of positive psychology. He authored The Happiness Advantage and founded GoodThink,Inc. His TEDxBloomington talk "The Happy Secret to Better Work" is one of the 20-most viewed TED talks...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEducator
CountryUnited States of America
motivation stress creativity
Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals.
meaningful past thinking
For two minutes a day, think of one positive experience that's occurred during the past 24 hours. Bullet point each detail you can remember. It works, because the brain can't tell the difference between visualization and actual experience. So you've just doubled the most meaningful experience in your brain.
glasses water important
The contents of the glass don’t matter; what’s more important is to realize there’s a pitcher of water nearby. In other words, we have the capacity to refill the glass, or to change our outlook.
powerful teaching grateful
Spend two minutes a day scanning the world for three new things you're grateful for. And do that for 21 days, The reason why that's powerful is you're training your brain to scan the world in a new pattern, you're scanning for positives, instead of scanning for threats. It's the fastest way of teaching optimism.
work-out brain being-positive
You have to train your brain to be positive just like you work out your body.
mean successful goal
Most people keep waiting on happiness, putting off happiness until they're successful or until they achieve some goal, which means we limit both happiness and success. That formula doesn't work.
strong jobs land
I've worked with farmers in Zimbabwe who've lost their lands. I've worked with people in Venezuela, under threat of kidnappings, whose external world is unstable. But they have very strong social connections with their family and friends. And as a result, they're able to maintain a greater level of happiness and optimism than I've seen from bankers, consultants, or salespeople who are on the road all the time, who follow jobs separated from their families, and, as a result, find themselves missing out on the happiness that comes from those very connections that they severed.
real views waste
Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time.