Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction: Beyond Happiness
The Power of Positive Genius
SKILL 1: Reality Architecture: Choosing the Most Valuable Reality
SKILL 2: Mental Cartography: Mapping Your Success Route
SKILL 3: The X-Spot: Finding Success Accelerants
SKILL 4: Noise Canceling: Boosting Your Positive Signal by Eliminating the Negative Noise
SKILL 5: Positive Inception: Transferring Your Positive Reality to Others
Positive Inspiration: A Case for Change
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
Copyright
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First published in the United States in 2013 by Crown Business,
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This edition published in the United Kingdom in 2013 by Virgin Books, an imprint of Ebury Publishing
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Copyright © Shawn Achor 2013
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To Michelle Gielan,
who changed everything I knew about happiness.
She is living proof that when we shine brightly,
this world can be transformed.
Before success, comes happiness.
Before happiness there is potential.
Before potential, there is your reality.
Welcome to the science of human potential.
The ability to create a reality in which all things are possible is one of the greatest precursors of success, performance and even happiness. Here, world renowned positive psychology expert from Harvard and bestselling author of The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor shares the five steps to help you raise your rate of success, helping you to achieve true greatness in every aspect of your life and career.
Shawn Achor is CEO of consultancy firm Good Think Inc. He gives 150 lectures a year on the science of human potential, speaking to audiences recently at Google, Adobe, UBS and Johnson and Johnson. He is a regular contributor to Harvard Business Review and Psychology Today. His TED talk on the Happiness Advantage has been viewed over 3 million times.
As I reflect on the wild ride of the past few years—getting to travel around the world researching and speaking about happiness—I am continually humbled by the realization that I began this journey in the depths of depression while at Harvard. I remember during divinity school my first attempt at journaling, in which I wrote, “I don’t remember being happy.” Some people who read this book will know that place well. And others will never experience that dark night of the soul. But I know this: Change is possible only when we link our lives to others. There are no words that can convey the deep gratitude I have for all the people who make every day, during every shining success and daunting setback, joyful and worth living.
This list is only a small fraction of those people.
Michelle Gielan, my fiancée, business partner, fellow researcher, best friend … so pretty much she deserves an entire acknowledgment book. I plan on spending my life writing it. She read The Happiness Advantage while in the UPenn positive psychology program. She e-mailed me, we met up, started working together, and fell in love all while researching and spreading happiness. If I had only known I’d get to meet her, I would have written the book earlier.
My sister Amy (the unicorn) and my brother Bobo Blankson for being both my compass and my rock. Their love, support, and wisdom are worth mixing metaphors. Little Ana, Gabri, and Kobi are the living fruits of their generous spirits.
Joe and Sharon Achor, lifelong educators, who taught me how to love. There is no better compliment.
Jordan Brock for his genius in helping grow our company; he believes so strongly that this research needs to be heard because he lives it as a business leader, husband, and father. He and his family are our family now.
Talia Krohn, my editor, who patiently worked with me for two years on this book as I kept trying to cram it with new research or rewrite whole sections as I got excited about something else. She’s amazing.
Stuart Johnson and Meridith Simes from Success magazine. Stuart is a visionary and Meridith makes it happen. They are not only reinventing Success, but they are going to be at the vanguard of how entrepreneurs worldwide use this research. They are also incredibly generous souls and friends. Thank you to their team, including Susan Kane, who has helped spread and advance this mission.
Rafe Sagalyn, my literary agent, who believed in me from the beginning. If you want an agent, Rafe is one of the best in the industry.
Jenny Canzoneri, Holli Catchpole, and the SpeakersOffice team in California, which officially handles all our back-office logistics flawlessly and tirelessly. If you are a speaker, you couldn’t find a better partner supporting your efforts.
CorpU for turning our research into an entire online academic and social course for companies worldwide. CorpU is the future of online education, so I’m so grateful that they are so interested in starting with happiness research.
Greg Kaiser, Kevin Karaffa, Greg Ray, and the entire International Thought Leader Network, including Donald Bargy, Marti Kaiser, and Reggie Tyler, for partnering with us to create a sustainable way to cascade the happiness advantage throughout companies. The parable-based train-the-trainer program we launched at Nationwide is fantastic, thanks to their dedication.
Heidi Krupp-Lisiten and Darren Lisiten from Krupp Kommunications (K2), who served as our top-notch PR team. It is great to work with a husband-wife team, as Michelle and I work hand in hand as well. They are fantastic if you want to reach multiple PR verticals and want to have fun doing it.
Crown Business team at Random House for their marketing efforts and investing so much energy in this project.
Ali Crum, a former student turned friend and inspiration. She is the rarest of breeds: a world-famous, brilliant academic with a way of connecting to anyone with her warm heart.
Marty Seligman for not only creating the field of positive psychology but also enabling an entire generation of disciples to bring this message forward.
Jeff Olson and Amber Olson, who dedicated themselves to rallying the troops at Nerium to make this research turn into a movement.
Cory Ludens and Mattress Firm for partnering with us on research and becoming a positive outlier company that thrives on passion.
Adam Grant, a modern-day genius and a new friend. Literally the smartest person I know. His book Give and Take is fantastic, and he helped me brainstorm several of the ideas in this book.
Gerry Richman from PBS and Colleen Steward from Tremendous! Entertainment, who partnered with us to create the PBS show for The Happiness Advantage. Thanks to them, the show aired in 88 percent of American homes.
Tony Hsieh, Jenn Lim, and James Key Lim at Delivering Happiness for partnering with us to help create culture change at companies based upon their incredible work at Zappos and the Downtown Project.
Christian Long and TEDxBloomington for getting us the TED spot that went viral.
Tal Ben-Shahar, who has inspired not only me but thousands like me to make positive changes, to become a better person, and to be excited about life.
Barbara Teszler, who is a PR bulldog who gets things done. She helped breathe PR life into the Institute for Applied Positive Research and The Happiness Advantage.
Alexis Roberts, for keeping her finger on the pulse of the happiness movement and beating a constant drumbeat of positivity.
Brent Furl, my spiritual buddy and lifelong friend, who keeps me focused on what is most important.
Kelci Brock, who is a continual source of light, wisdom, and fun. We could not do what we are doing without her.
Mike Lampert and Laura Babbitt, whose warm friendship has served as a great “Haven.”
Writing a book requires massive emotional support. Thank you for my friends who were there to shoulder the burden or be patient or just be fun: Olivia “Sfouf” Shabb, Greg and Cathy McCain, Max Weisbuch, Caleb Merkl, Matt and Jess Glazer, Eric Karpinski, Heidi Hanna, and many others.
I study positive outliers: people who are up above the curve for any given dimension. This whole group of amazing outliers and friends needs to be studied more. I hope you hear their voices on every page.
If you want to change your life, you first have to change your reality. |
In my first book, The Happiness Advantage, I described the research on how a happy brain reaps a massive advantage in the workplace. I wrote about how, when we find and create happiness in our work, we show increased intelligence, creativity, and energy, improving nearly every single business and educational outcome. In short, that book was about how happiness comes before success. This book is about what comes before both. If you want to create positive change in your life, you first have to change your reality.
To be honest, I think I’ve learned more about happiness over the past five years than I did in a decade sitting in labs and teaching in classrooms at Harvard. During this time, I have had the opportunity to travel to fifty-one countries, speaking at companies and schools and learning more about this connection between success and happiness. But each place I visited pushed me harder. The more I observed, the more I wanted to understand how we can positively change people’s view of the world to make them not just happier in the moment but more engaged, more motivated, more alive—permanently. I wanted to learn how we could help people not just succeed at certain tasks, or accomplish certain goals, but reach entirely new levels of success. But over the course of my travels I also found that it wasn’t enough to study success and happiness where it was easiest: in a controlled experiment with privileged university students as subjects. I wanted to test my theories where it was hardest.
So to my mother’s dismay, I was driven to lectures in Venezuela in bulletproof cars to speak with leaders under threats of “express kidnappings” about the research on resilience. I slept in huts in Tanzania surrounded by the biggest spiders I’ve ever seen (and I’m from Texas, so that’s saying something) to hear from people who had been kicked off their land but who remained optimistic. I spoke about happiness at a public school assembly on the one-year anniversary of a mass shooting at the school. In a shantytown in Kenya I met with illiterate mothers, one of whom was determined that her eight-year-old daughter would go to Harvard someday. I was the positive psychology expert for the Everyday Matters campaign to see if happiness remains a choice for individuals with a chronic neuromuscular disease. I worked with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in the midst of an epidemic of depression, and Freddie Mac in the midst of a mortgage crisis. My company began working on an ambitious initiative at Walmart aimed at raising the happiness levels of their 1.5 million associates who are struggling to make ends meet in the face of complicated family and educational issues. And I met with doctors attempting to cure terminal cancer in children at St. Jude and Boston Children’s Hospitals to find out why sick four-year-olds are more likely to tell their parents that “everything will be okay” than the reverse.
At the other end of the spectrum, I was invited to work with Google and Facebook as they dealt with the confusing influx of wealth that was, ironically, sapping employees of their engagement and motivation. What did I learn? That for all my research about the connection between success and happiness, I was missing something important.
Happiness led to success, true, but what gave someone—especially someone facing obstacles and hardships—the understanding that happiness was possible in the first place? Why did achievement and happiness seem like a possibility to one person but impossible to someone else in the same position or situation? Why did some illiterate mothers believe their children could get into Harvard, while others couldn’t fathom the idea? Why did some of the impoverished children in Indonesia create a happy playtime with only some sticks and string, while others sat bored and sullen? Why could missing out on a bonus inspire one leader at a UK financial services company to work better and harder, while causing another leader at the same company to give up and stop trying? Why did some people diagnosed with MS suddenly start training for marathons, while others remained mired in the belief that they’d lost the ability to participate fully in life?
Soon it became clear. The reason some people were thriving while others—people in the exact same situation—were stuck in hopelessness was that they were literally living in different realities. Some were living in a reality in which happiness and success seemed possible, despite the obstacles. Others were living in a “reality” where it was not. After all, how could someone expect to achieve happiness or success when stuck in the mindset that neither was possible?
I began to realize that if we wanted to create a real, long-lasting, and sustainable change, we needed to show people how to fundamentally change their reality—the entire lens through which they viewed their world.
Of course, there are certain objective facts we must accept about our lives. Those kids in Tanzania are poor. Those UK bankers did miss out on those bonuses. Those MS sufferers are sick. But how we choose to look at those objective facts is in our minds. And only when we choose to believe that we live in a world where challenges can be overcome, our behavior matters, and change is possible can we summon all our drive, energy, and emotional and intellectual resources to make that change happen.
My research over the past five years, coupled with other amazing research emerging from positive psychology labs all over the globe, helped me understand what I had been missing: that before happiness and success comes your perception of your world. So before we can be happy and successful, we need to create a positive reality that allows us to see the possibility for both.
This book is the culmination of my research showing that there is a simple five-step process for raising our levels of success and happiness by changing our reality to positive.
But to be clear, when I say, “creating a positive reality,” I don’t mean simply being optimistic. I also don’t mean adopting some sort of deluded view of the world in which simply wishing for wealth will suddenly result in a windfall of millions, or simply envisioning your cancer disappearing will cure you forever. This is neither positive nor productive. When I talk about a positive reality, I’m not talking about one in which good things magically happen by the sheer power of positive thinking; I’m talking about one in which you can summon all your cognitive, intellectual, and emotional resources to create positive change, because you believe that true change is possible.
The consistent ability to create this kind of reality is called positive genius, and it turns out to be the greatest precursor of success, performance, and even happiness. In this book I’ll share five practical, research-based steps to help you raise your levels of positive genius and, in turn, your rates of success. The steps are:
Before potential, there is a motivation. Before motivation, there is an emotion. And before emotion, there is your reality. This reality is the difference between fleeting happiness and a permanent mindset that fosters success in every personal and professional endeavor. The goal of this book is to help you become a positive genius so that you can achieve true greatness in every aspect of your life and career.
BEFORE I WAS born, my father, who was a neuroscientist at UC Irvine at the time, made me an unwilling subject of one of the very first EEG experiments conducted on an unborn child. He and his colleagues hooked up electrodes to the belly of my very pregnant (and clearly very patient) mom to see if they could detect and analyze my brain wave patterns. The tests failed (I’m not sure what that says about my brain), but some influences in our lives run deep. Even before birth, I was wired for a love of psychology and science.
A mere six years later, I willingly volunteered for another neuroscience experiment, which, though of course I had no way of knowing it at the time, would ultimately lead to the writing of this book. By that point my father was a professor at Baylor University. All of my babysitters happened to be students from his introductory psychology classes, and I was in love with all of them. But as I slowly started realizing that my relationships with them weren’t going as well as I’d hoped (for instance, my parents had to pay the girls at the end of the date), I decided—after observing the successes of Ariel in The Little Mermaid—that I would need to become part of their world. So I asked my dad if I could be part of one his classroom demonstrations. He was so excited that his son might be following in his footsteps that he didn’t stop to wonder if I had ulterior motives—as indeed I did.
Regardless, he brought me to Baylor University for one of his famous lectures. I remember sitting in the bulky, brown chair in front of the class as he attached electrode after electrode to my scalp with conductive jelly. I didn’t care; I was just happy because all of my girlfriends’ eyes were on me.
But in his excitement about having his son in class, my dad made a simple mistake. He forgot to ground the wire and left it lying across a copper strip on the floor. When he turned on the machine, the current passed right through me—it was as though I had stuck my finger in a socket. To this day, I don’t blame my dad for shocking me. I do blame him for laughing along with the entire class as I angrily pulled off all my electrodes and strode off with as much indignation as a six-year-old could muster.
Not surprisingly, I never did get to date any of his students. But I am grateful to my dad nonetheless for hooking me up to that torture machine, because his experiments gave me a lifelong fascination with studying how the brain perceives the world. That evil instrument was a primitive evoked potential machine, a device that records the electrical activity along the scalp, thus allowing neuroscientists to measure and record levels of activity in the brain as it processes stimuli from the external world.
Look around at the people in your office, on the subway, sitting across from you at the cafe. Have you ever wondered if the world you see is the same one they see? Have you worked with a stressed manager who constantly points out only the flaws and none of the good, or spent time with a relative during the holidays who complains about everything despite being surrounded by love, and thought to yourself: How could they possibly see the world that way?
The reason some people see the world so differently from others is that the human brain doesn’t just take a picture of the external world like a camera; it is constantly interpreting and processing the information it receives. Every time the world provides us with information, whether the report of a down stock market, a stressful e-mail, or a smiling coworker, our brains expend energy creating our understanding of this information. This energy is called “evoked potential,” and EEGs were some of the first instruments that allowed us to peek behind the curtain and better understand this process.
While the human brain receives eleven million pieces of information every second from our environment, it can process only forty bits per second, which means it has to choose what tiny percentage of this input to process and attend to, and what huge chunk to dismiss or ignore.1 Thus your reality is a choice; what you choose to focus on shapes how you perceive and interpret your world.
Today, using EEGs, fMRIs, and eye-tracking machines, we have the ability to measure and study those energy patterns. And more important, we are now learning how to change these energy patterns to help us create a more positive interpretation of the world around us.
This is key, because the better your brain is at using its energy to focus on the positives, the greater your chances at success.
This book is all about how to evoke your potential, by changing your mindset.
The goal of science is prediction. If you take vitamin C, doctors want to be able to predict whether it will lower your chances of getting a cold. If you drop a bowling ball at one hundred feet, physicists want to predict how hard it will hit the ground.
The goal of business is to build revenue and create sustainable, growing income. Since a business can only be as successful as the people working in it, companies have long sought a way to use science to predict high performance in individuals. Yet for all the research that has been done on the topic, no theory has ever been able to fully explain the science of human potential—until now.
Back in the nineteenth century, Sir Francis Galton was among the first to study how our brains’ energy patterns predicted performance. Without the aid of EEGs, of course, he posited that intelligence could be quantified and predicted by the speed of the brain’s processing system.2 The faster your brain is at discerning sensory stimuli and reacting, he hypothesized, the smarter you are. But of course, reaction time is only one small piece of the complex equation of human intelligence.
From the 1920s through the 1980s, scientists thought potential could be measured by IQ, which was basically just a measure of one’s verbal and math skills. So businesses and governments poured money into pumping up math and reading in public schools and shut down the arts and music programs. HR departments designed tests based upon IQ, then hired everyone from salespeople to CEOs using those same yardsticks of intelligence.
Problem was, they had it all wrong. As it turns out, IQ and technical skills combined predict only 20 to 25 percent of job success.3 That means that over 75 percent of your career outcome has nothing to do with your intelligence and training—which is a huge problem because in a down economy companies spend a majority of their training budgets attempting to raise employee intelligence and technical skills. This money, scientifically speaking, is irresponsibly spent.
So how else can we predict professional success? If IQ is a bad predictor, maybe SAT scores, a more modern testing tool, would be better? Not the case. As a matter of fact, they are much worse. SAT scores predict only 8 to 15 percent of college freshmen’s GPA, which means that for around 88.5 percent of college students SAT scores are no better at predicting academic success than a pair of dice.4 (Again, it is a shame that we waste hours and hours preparing for predictive tests that are not actually predictive.)
The next metric businesses tried to use to predict prospective employees’ performance was grades. High school grades are twice as predictive of college success as SAT scores. Great, grades must predict potential for future success in the workplace too, right? Thomas J. Stanley, PhD, author of The Millionaire Mind, begs to differ. After a decade of research, he found no correlation between grades and professional success: a coin flip would be as predictive of greatness as grades.5 This explains the oft-cited paradox that so many C students in business school end up running companies and so many A students end up working for them.
Enter researchers like Howard Gardner and Peter Salovey. Gardner was the first to argue that the ability to understand one’s own feelings as well as the feelings of others was more important than IQ. In 1990, two psychologists, Peter Salovey at Yale (whom you will read more about later) and John D. Mayer at the University of New Hampshire, published an earth-shattering paper arguing that the predictive value of IQ was low and that the ability to understand feelings was a far greater predictor of human potential.6 They dubbed this emotional intelligence.
Most of you are probably familiar with emotional intelligence. It refers to your ability to regulate your emotions, and for the past two decades it has been thought to be the key to succeeding in the often stressful and volatile world of business. Spurred on by Daniel Goleman’s internationally bestselling book Emotional Intelligence, which popularized research like Salovey’s, companies all over the world began testing employees’ and potential employees’ emotional intelligence quotient (EQ) instead of IQ. The big debate among academics and at companies became, Which is more important, IQ or EQ? This is where society and science took a major wrong turn. Now, please do not misunderstand, I think emotional intelligence was one of the best theories to come out of psychology labs in the 1990s. But the question of which kind of intelligence was more important was the wrong one.
Soon, Gardner introduced his second main category of intelligence, the ability to understand and relate to other people. He called it “social intelligence,” and again, Goleman introduced it to the business world with his bestselling book Social Intelligence. Again, the science was valid, but its value as a predictor of potential was undercut by the misguided “which is most important” debate.
Companies and researchers have been arguing this question ever since. Which is most important: IQ, emotional intelligence, or social intelligence? This is talking in circles. It’s like asking which is more important in sports, offense or defense, or who is more important to a business, clients or employees. To be truly successful, instead of thinking about intelligence in isolation, we need to focus on how to combine all our intelligences.
Once I immersed myself in the research, it couldn’t have been clearer. Yes, all these intelligences matter, but what matters most is how your brain knits them together. Thus the question should not be, which intelligence is most important, but how we can learn to harness and amplify them.
How can you predict or measure greatness?
The question is not merely a preoccupation of today’s leaders seeking to take their teams or companies from good to great; it’s been around since the dawn of civilization. In fact, it was addressed by the very first ancient Greek philosopher.
Thales of Miletus had a problem: he wanted to figure out how great the Great Pyramid was. But as it was the tallest building created (and would be for another thousand years!), he could hardly measure its height with a tape measure. And sadly, he had no Internet service, so Wikipedia was out.
So how do you figure out how tall the Great Pyramid is without the ability to measure it?
Any ideas? I didn’t figure it out at first, which might explain my geometry grade in high school. Fortunately, Thales did. He thought, What if I measure the length of the pyramid’s shadow? If I could do that, then perhaps I could calculate the missing leg of the pyramid.
But as the sun moved, the shadow of the Great Pyramid would shorten or lengthen, so he soon realized he needed another piece of information: when the sun was in perfect position where the height of the pyramid and its shadow would be equal (an isosceles triangle, for those of you who like geometry). Thus he merely stuck a stick in the ground, measured the height of the stick, then waited all day until the sun made a shadow exactly equal to the height of the stick. At that precise moment, the pyramid’s shadow would be equal to the height of the pyramid.7
Thales had figured out how to measure the height of the pyramid by triangulation when there was no other way to figure out how great it truly was.
Over the last hundred years, academic giants similarly attempted to triangulate human potential. For the last twenty years we knew that the three sides of the triangle were IQ, emotional intelligence, and social intelligence. Yet something was still missing.
While each of these intelligences on its own had some impact, the shadow of greatness kept shifting. Like scientists studying dark matter in the universe, we knew a hidden dimension must exist, but we didn’t know how to measure it. Like Thales, we still didn’t know all the dimensions of the triangle.
I started working with companies in the midst of the Great Recession to find the missing dimension. At first my goal was to help companies stop making the mistake of arguing about which side of the triangle was most valuable. But I couldn’t stop there, because I was still left with some really important questions: What are emotions based upon? Where does a person’s perception of the world, which is not an emotion, fit in? And most important, what predicts how a person will use all three of the intelligences to create greatness?
After five years of extensive research, it all finally clicked: the hidden leg of the triangle—the one that allows us to summon, combine, and amplify these three existing intelligences—is the ability to see a reality in which success is possible.
There’s no question that emotional intelligence, social intelligence, and IQ have an impact on our success rates. But these all arise from one place: our underlying reality. Because before you feel an emotion about the world, before you connect to another person, before you begin solving a problem, your brain has already created a reality about whether success can be achieved. That reality is the key to everything. It is what lets you see opportunities instead of obstacles, new roads instead of dead ends, paths to success instead of failure.
While I was consulting out in California, one of the senior innovation leaders at Google told me he felt that “some people just saw a different reality at work, which changed how much they could lead or innovate.” He was right. Everything we do in business and in life is largely determined by our underlying reality, or our mindset. In other words, positive genius isn’t just the amplifier of all other forms of intelligences; it’s also the precursor.
This book does not negate all the research on IQ and emotional and social intelligence. Your IQ teaches you what you need to do, emotional intelligence shows how, and social intelligence illuminates with whom. Those three intelligences are the legs of your “triangle of success.” But if you want to amplify your potential, you need to turn that two-dimensional triangle of success into a three-dimensional prism by constructing a positive reality first.
After all, you can have all the IQ and emotional and social intelligence in the world, but if you believe that your behavior doesn’t matter, then you’ll never bother to apply all those cognitive, social, emotional, and intellectual resources to accomplish your goals. Everyone knows someone like this, someone who has all the core intelligences but never uses them because he doesn’t believe it would make a difference anyway. Unused intelligence, whether in a smart but unmotivated employee, a brilliant but disengaged student, or a visionary but disaffected leader, does nothing to evoke your potential.
Other people are experts at creating positive realities. These are the people who seem to have the Midas touch at work, the people who turn every opportunity, every relationship, every setback to gold. They are the people who continually find new possibilities to pounce on. They are the ones who discover ways around the obstacles that seem most insurmountable, the ones who solve the problems that seem most intractable.
It’s not that they don’t see the negative realities in the world, it’s that they also see they have the ability to do something about them. They can see the tragedy in the earthquake in Japan or understand the difficulty in treating breast cancer or recognize the racial injustices in our educational system—but they are also the ones who search for ways to help the survivors or raise money for medical research or continue to work to invent a more fair system. These people are what I call positive geniuses, and in this book I’ll show you how you can become one as well.
Only once we can see and construct a reality in which we have the power to create positive change—one in which our behavior matters—can we truly summon and utilize the entirety of our brain’s abilities and intelligences to achieve ever-greater success and happiness. Success, then, is not just about how much intelligence you have; it’s about how much of your intelligence you believe you can use.
This change to the way we approach intelligence changes everything. Every single business outcome—from sales volume to customer retention to revenue growth to career advancement—and even every personal outcome—from relationship quality to life satisfaction to better health—are governed by this basic equation. By mastering the five skills in this book, you will learn to turn your own triangle of intelligences into a prism of success.
Along the way I will share research showing how these skills have been used to quadruple sales at call centers, increase engagement at companies by 31 percent, raise accuracy rates among doctors by 19 percent, lower fatigue by 23 percent, increase customers’ likelihood to refer by nearly 30 percent, significantly improve customer satisfaction, increase the likelihood of living to age ninety-four, raise the likelihood of a promotion by 40 percent, and even more.8
But that isn’t the end of the story. Not only can positive genius help us see a greater range of opportunities, solutions, and routes to success, it can help others—our colleagues, our teams, our families—do so as well. Exciting new research proves that by sharing our own positive reality we can help others architect theirs, exponentially increasing the amount of collective intelligence we have available. You’ll learn how to reap the benefits of this later in the book, using a technique called positive inception.
And here’s some great news: It doesn’t matter how many advanced degrees you have or how socially adept you are or how high your IQ is. Anyone can become a positive genius by mastering the five empirically validated skills you’ll learn in this book.
In November of 2011, I got an exciting e-mail. The Harvard Business Review wrote to tell me that my research on the happiness advantage was going to be on the cover of their magazine for January/February 2012!9 The whole issue would be dedicated to how happiness leads to successful business outcomes. As I worked on crafting the article, I thought to myself, Finally, this research is making it into the mainstream of business understanding and leadership. We need people to take it seriously. I just hope they don’t put a big smiley face on the cover. No way they’d do that.
When I received my copy just in time for Christmas, I had to laugh. Sure enough, I was staring at a large smiley face, with dollar sign dimples. But then I saw it: look at this cover, what’s wrong with this picture? The smiley face has no eyes! It is blind happiness. This is exactly what’s wrong with most people’s understanding of happiness in the workplace. Happiness is not about being blind to the negatives in our environment; it’s about believing we have the power to do something about them.
Once, after I gave a lecture at a large tech company, the cheerful CEO generously offered to take me to the airport so we could keep talking about how to apply my research at his company. I got into his beautiful black Escalade and put on my seat belt. He jumped in, but he didn’t put on his, even when the seat belt alarm started chiming over and over. I had just met this CEO, but I decided to ask, “You don’t wear seat belts?” And he energetically said, “No, I’m an optimist!”
That’s not optimism, that’s insanity. Optimism is good for many things, but it will definitely not keep other cars from hitting you or keep you from flying through the windshield. That is irrational optimism. An irrational optimist has a vision of reality based on desire and delusion, not how things actually are. Irrational optimism is why financial bubbles form, why we buy homes we can’t afford, and why we prematurely put up banners that say “Mission accomplished.” Irrational optimists see the world through rose-colored glasses without realizing that those tinted lens don’t enhance their vision, they distort it. And as a result, their decisions and actions are Pollyannaish and flawed. You can’t sugarcoat the present and still make good decisions for the future.
True success emerges from positive realities, not positive delusions. So how do we architect a reality that is both positive and real?
This is the question I’ve sought to answer in my work all over the world. In 2011, while conducting a study (later published in 2013 in the top social psychology journal) at UBS with Yale researchers Ali Crum and Peter Salovey, I had a breakthrough.
We discovered that if we could change someone’s perception of the stress they were under, we could actually change how stress affected them physically.10 By simply showing employees videos about the more positive (and again, real) effects of stress on the body, we observed a 23 percent drop in fatigue and other stress-related symptoms (backaches, headaches, et cetera). I’ll explain this study more fully later in the book, but the point is that simply by helping people see a new but equally true reality in which stress could be motivating and energizing, rather than debilitating, we could make that more positive outcome actually become real.
Positive genius is not about optimism or pessimism, or seeing the glass as half empty or half full. Because in truth, half empty and half full are not the only possible options. Both optimists and pessimists are so focused on how to interpret the single glass in front of them, they can miss the fact that there is a third, equally true reality—a pitcher of water on the table to refill the glass. Positive geniuses, on the other hand, can see the full pitcher, and with it a greater range of opportunities, possibilities, and paths to success.
If you are still having doubts that the skills of positive genius can help us surmount seemingly insurmountable obstacles or solve seemingly unsolvable problems or meet seemingly unmeetable challenges, consider the following example.
Two U.S. Army Rangers stand with heavy backpacks looking up at a hill in southern Afghanistan. The hill is precisely 600 feet tall. But after the mental and physical fatigue of fierce combat, the first soldier’s brain judges that hill to be around 900 feet. And the soldier does more than just misjudge the hill: he actually sees a 900-foot hill, not a 600-foot hill. What he perceives becomes his reality. The steeper his brain perceives the hill to be, the more fatigued his body becomes. He collapses on one knee, ready to give up despite heavy enemy pursuit. Why soldier on when his brain tells him success is impossible?
Yet all is not lost. His fellow Ranger was recruited because she is a positive genius.
When this second Ranger looks at the hill, despite her injuries and fatigue, her well-trained brain perceives the hill as 600 feet and thus surmountable in time. This gives her the energy and motivation to quickly climb another 50 feet, upon which she notices a less steep and more rubble-free path up the hillside leading to a helicopter extraction point. Her brain is now convinced that a successful mission is possible, allowing her to summon her cognitive resources to map the best path up the hill. Now feeling even more positive and convinced that she will get herself and her partner up to the top of the hill, where they can be rescued by helicopter, her brain releases extra energy reserves, called success accelerants, allowing her to rally her physical and emotional resources to help her teammate to climb. Eliminating all distracting noises both internal and external (doubts and gunfire), she drags her partner toward the extraction point. As they climb, she tells him repeatedly that they will make it until he too finds the energy and drive to keep climbing. It’s not long before they reach the top, where they are rescued. Success became their reality.
This is not an entirely theoretical story. In fact, it is based upon an actual experiment performed by researchers at the University of Virginia led by Dennis Proffitt, who were looking at how our perception of physical space is constructed in the brain.11 What they found was that when we are in a negative or fatigued state of mind, our brains actually perceive hills as being significantly higher and backpacks as significantly heavier. And this principle doesn’t apply just to hiking; further research has revealed that when we’re in a negative mindset, all loads feel heavier, all obstacles loom bigger, all mountains seem less surmountable. This is especially true in the workplace, and it’s why, when we look at stress, workload, and competition from a negative mindset, our performance suffers.
In the above example, IQ alone would not have saved those soldiers. Neither would emotional intelligence or social intelligence, or any combination of the above—if that Ranger hadn’t created a positive reality first. After all, the ability to conjugate verbs and calculate standard deviations would not have gotten those soldiers to the top of the hill. Nor would the ability to regulate emotions or navigate complex social dynamics. But a positive reality could and did.
In this scenario, the second Ranger used the five skills of positive genius that you will learn in this book. First, she perceived a reality in which success was possible (skill 1). Then she mapped a route to success (skill 2). Once she made progress on that route, her brain was able to release success accelerants to get her there faster (skill 3), all the while canceling out distracting and destructive negative noise (skill 4). Then, once she had reaped the benefits of her positive reality, she created positive inception (skill 5) by transferring that reality to her teammate.
These are the exact skills you will learn in the following chapters of this book.