The Unmistakable Creative Podcast

Unmistakable Classic: Scientifically Proven Advice for Becoming Happier with Shawn Achor

In this Unmistakable Creative Classic, we speak with happiness researcher Shawn Achor about scientifically proven advice for become happier. His work in positive psychology has resulted in discoveries of incredibly simple and effective happiness advice.

A look at Shawn’s early work in religion and spirituality
Why positive brains lead to better outcomes
The opportunity to choose between multiple careers
Why you don’t have the meditate for 7 years to be happy
Divorcing yourself from your genetic makeup
How to make changes to your habits by tapping into past success
Making a mindset shift to separate happiness from your environment
Why we study and learn from positive outliers
Going to back to places when you had less than now but were happy
Why genetics and environment don’t indicate our potential
How People Experience Post Traumatic Growth
Learning how to become more optimistic and productive
Ideas for spying yourself towards your goal
Scientifically proven tips for becoming happier
Why small changes have the greatest impact on our lives
How to rock your to do list
Putting the concept of activation energy to work
Why vision boards usually don’t work for people

Shawn Achor is the author of Before Happiness and The Happiness Advantage. He is also a positive psychology researcher, speaker and founder of GoodThink, Inc.

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Duration:: 1h 5m
Broadcast on:: 18 Apr 2014
Audio Format:: other

As you probably noticed this month, we're bringing you our "Life of Purpose" series and revisiting some of our most transformative episodes, tune in to explore expert insights and practical strategies on help, performance, and community well-being, all aimed at helping you achieve personal and professional fulfillment. If you sign up for the newsletter, you'll not only get recaps of the key ideas in each interview, but at the end of the series, you'll receive our free "Life of Purpose" ebook. What you have to do is go to unmistakablecreative.com/lifepurpose. I'm Srinney Rao, and this is the Unmistakable Creative Podcast, where I speak with creative entrepreneurs, artists, and other insanely interesting people to hear their stories, learn about their molding moments, tipping points, and spectacular takeoffs. Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. 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And that is, can you tell us a bit about yourself, your background, and kind of how that has brought you to doing the work that you're doing today? It's a great question because I didn't go straight for positive psychology, which is what I do now. I fell into it backwards. So I had applied to Harvard University on the day and got in. And we couldn't afford it, but I got to go on a Navy ROTC scholarship. So I spent most of my time there studying religious texts, which is what I was studying as an undergrad, and then doing military drills and learning about weapons systems in the mornings, early mornings. And the more I started doing this, the more I got fascinated by the choices that people made in their life seem to be based upon the way that they're bringing constructed the world in the first place. So I decided to disenroll from the ROTC program, take on all that debt, and went to the Divinity School, where I studied Christian and Buddhist ethics and got to explore this even further. But this whole idea of, I took this fantastic class by this professor named Charles Halacy, who did this class called Comparative Religious Ethics, where you took the same idea, the same problem, either world problem or philosophical problem. It could be something like the Holocaust, and you'd read about it from different religious traditions perspective. So what an orthodox Jew would think, or what a Zen Buddhist would think, or what a Roman Catholic would think. And what I walked away from that realizing was that your conception of the world, your picture of the world, before you made any decisions about how you'd act in the world was already setting the course for what was going to happen next. And I got fascinated by studying, fascinated with this whole idea of what was causing people to create these different realities that they were living in, and then changing the way that they lived in the world so dramatically. And right when I was doing that, people in the psychology department at Harvard and social psychology said they wanted to ask those same questions, but from a scientific perspective. And I was hooked. So I decided to switch over to do positive psychology and now find myself doing research that oftentimes validates exactly what we've been hearing from this religious traditions for the past several thousands of years, but now being validated based upon things that are being done in neuroscience, the work that I'm doing out with corporations in the world, and ways in which we're finding that positive brains actually lead to not only greater business outcomes, but health outcomes, educational outcomes, and ways that we change the world. So that's how I fell backwards into it. Okay, very, very cool. A lot of questions come from me, but I want to kind of take a few steps back into the earlier part of your background. It's interesting because one of the reasons I appreciated your work so much was for the first time is like, wow, this isn't just a bunch of hokey new age bullshit. Like you've got scientific evidence backing it up. And I was like, it kind of was a refreshing perspective on the whole self improvement movement. And in fact, when I wrote the review for The Happiness Advantage, I said, wow, this is the first time I found a book that actually gives you something to do that isn't like crazy impossible. Like you don't have to go off to a monastery for seven years to find yourself type of thing. But you know, I think that the part that I'm really curious about is kind of how sort of the perspective that you got from the Christian and Buddhist work that you studied in the earlier days has kind of shaped and influenced the way you approach the work you do and sort of how you live life in general in your worldview. It's great. Thank you so much for these questions. You know, I never get to talk about this very much because I speak out in the corporate world all the time. So most of my, you know, like this is a topic that we would often stray from, but it's fascinating that the top two researchers that study the connection between happiness and religion, they actually found neither of them are religious, but they found that religion highly correlates with levels of happiness. And just today there's a article that came out that said that, you know, based upon even following the verbal patterns in Twitter that they found that people who have religious affiliation seem to have higher levels of happiness, what I would question is why. Now, being religious myself, I might have different answers than some of the psychologists, which by the way, this is fascinating. Did you know that the, we were learning this in psychology courses that 98% of Americans believe in some sort of a higher power or God, but only 7% of psychologists actually do. So what's amazing is that a lot of the therapy and the psychology and the way that we think about the world is oftentimes looked at from perspective that's very different from what most people look at. What we've done in positive psychology is we've tried to learn from these various traditions. So for example, one of the things that says in Christianity is that we need to stop conforming to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of our minds. The reason I like this is that it states from the beginning that there are multiple realities that we could possibly pick from and that some of them are going to be more valuable than others and that we could try and pick some of those. Or in Buddhism, we oftentimes get perspectives where if you can consciously craft the way that you think about the world, not only does it change the way you act in it, it actually can literally change the brain. Now that we're connecting things like Buddhism to neuroscience, we're able to watch as people's gamma wave patterns in the brain change as they meditate for more than 10,000 hours. And one of the things I liked about all of this was the two things that you mentioned, which are, first of all, you get people in the corporate world and the religious space and the political space. When people write books, they're like, "Hey, this worked for me and now everyone should do this as well." Part of what I wanted to find out is is that actually true? Did that work just for you or just because of your circumstances or is there something universal about how the human brain works that you've discovered a pattern that we could actually benefit from and that we could test and that would work and that would not only raise your levels of happiness, but we could see it affect your IQ scores, your creativity scores, your likelihood of getting a sale, all of those different types of things. But then the other thing that was really exciting to me is that you didn't have to go meditate on a mountain side for 80 days, which is not very practical for most of us given our families and our jobs, but that literally a 45 second intervention done for 21 days in a row could change your brain from your genetic set point and allow you to be able to divorce yourself from the tyranny of the external world and your genes, which that's what got me. I mean, that's what's revolutionary. I think about this research is to see how small things could so dramatically change the way our brain works. Well, we're going to get into all of that because I mean, that's the part I think people here who are listening are really going to find valuable. You know, I want to do a little more digging into your story here and I love all of this. Part of what's interesting, you know, you mentioned the idea of falling backwards into what you do through sort of multiple and disparate paths. And I think the nature of what we're going through as a society, as an economy, is leading to more of that, I think, than we've ever seen in our lives and you brought up the idea of not sort of letting our bill or will bend to conformity type of thing. You know, a lot of people listening to this are in these positions where they're trying to make career transitions and I'm really curious kind of, you know, having sort of worked with people in the corporate world that you've seen and just from your research of people in general, how we do that and at the same time sort of find meaning and purpose in our work, which I realize is a big question. Yeah, I think it is because oftentimes when we're thinking about changes we want to make to our environment, we're oftentimes ignoring, ignoring changes that we can make in the present. In other words, if we're thinking about the future oftentimes we're forgetting about the past and the present. One thing that I've been researching recently is this whole idea of that people set goals for themselves, right? Like resolutions or like, you know, I'm really going to make these changes to my life and my career and this is what I'm going to do. And oftentimes when we make those big changes, we think about all the things we're not currently doing right now or that we're not doing very well. And what we're finding in this research is that we need to be able to prime ourselves with a recognition of the successes that have led us to this current moment and the things we're grateful for in the present. If we're going to be motivated to make any changes in the future for career changes for anything else. So now it affects, that's kind of like a global idea that affects things at a very simple level. So now when I set like habits for myself or oftentimes catching myself being like, oh, you know, I haven't eaten dessert for like three days. I love this. I'm going to do it for the next month straight, you know. But then I like start over at zero tomorrow. I'm like, tomorrow I'm going to start doing this, but really I'm going to bring it for three days. Or if I'm starting a new habit, what I really want to do is every time I make those new habits or have those, you know, epiphany moments where you write these long emails to your friends and family about all the changes you want to make to your life. That you started with all the times when you made changes in your life in the past, they were actually successful. Because what we find is that your brain accelerates towards goals based upon progress you've made in the past and how close that goal actually is perceived. The further way it is and the less progress you believe you've made in your life, you're not actually not, you're not going to be able to accelerate towards those goals. But I think the other side of it is exactly what you're saying is that can you find more meaning in the work that you're doing right now and when do you need to make the decision to make a dramatic change to your life in terms of like a job change or a change to the friends that you're hanging out with or any of those. And so I think that's the other side of the coin as well. Well, you know, it's interesting you bring that up and I love that example because I remember that from the book about goals being further away. And I always kind of had to remind myself it's like, you know, don't look at how far you have to go, look at how far you've come. And even, you know, as an avid surfer, there are moments when I would get into these plateaus where I'm like, wow, I've been surfing for four years and I feel like this is the first time I've been in the water. And then I have to kind of look back and say, okay, well, you know, sometimes it's what I call this concept of invisible progress. And I'm like, okay, I'm trying to think so far ahead that, you know, I always say it's kind of like live in the moment but keep your eyes on the horizon type of thing. And you're right, I mean, we don't look back often. But you know, one of the questions that comes from me around this, and I think this will make a perfect setup to really getting into the core of your work and starting to talk to that sort of a practical framework for how this applies in our lives. I mean, so much of what you talk about and the work that you do is based on making internal changes, which cause, you know, our external environment to transform. And I think that a lot of us can understand that intellectually. I mean, there's not a single book that doesn't talk about this. And we kind of, we know it, right? We're like, yeah, okay, that makes all the sense in the world. But in a lot of ways, I think it takes sort of a radical mindset shift to get to the point where you actually buy into that, right? And I'm wondering how we can start to make that kind of a shift. Yeah, it's a great point because it's one of those things that we feel like that we give lip service to but then don't actually follow. Like, so, you know, I started doing this research outside of just laboratories. You know, one of the things we found with psychology was that most of the psychology studies we were doing were on college freshmen, you know, in classes where we were grading them. And then we were like, yep, everyone else is exactly like this person. That's just not true. So I really wanted to research this out in the messiness of life. So we did this in the midst of the banking crisis and the world economy collapsing. And to see if we could find change to the way that people viewed happiness in the way that they looked at the world. And one of the things that we found was they're like, I could be talking to bankers who didn't get their bonus. And they could say, it's impossible for me to feel happy right now given the fact that I just didn't get my bonus. And I was expecting it or given the fact that we don't know what's going on with the company or that there might be restructurings. And in each one of those cases, what that person's doing is they've linked their happiness. They're actually given over in the entirety of their happiness to the external world. Now, as researchers, we can also tell you the exact flip, which is when we look at this, if we know everything about your external world, we can only predict about 10% of the variability in long-term levels of happiness. 90% of our long-term levels of happiness is not about the external world, but about how the brain processes the external world based upon your mindset and the genes that you've been given. And so part of what we can know that at the intellectual level, but to convince people of that idea, that actually happiness can be separated from the environment requires effort and requires experience. And I think people get that when they do things like travel. So if you go to an impoverished country, and you find people who seemingly have nothing compared to what we have, but have extremely high levels of social support, of optimism, of hope. I mean, two of the places that I found the highest levels of just joy in the people were places I didn't expect, which was Zimbabwe, which was living under, you know, a military dictator in a country that had given their agricultural lands to people who weren't farming them and people were starving. And yet they were some of the most optimistic people I'd met. And in Venezuela, same type of situation. And yet these people in the midst of chaos and express kidnappings were some of the most happy and positive and optimistic people that I had met and just so grateful for what they had. What that begins to help us to do is to realize that there are multiple ways of looking at the exact same reality. One of the bakers I worked with on the day he didn't get his bonus, he went home so angry at his company, went home that night, told his family that they didn't get this money that they expected and that they weren't going to go out to eat at a fancy dinner at that night. But instead they were going to go work at a soup kitchen. So he took his whole family and that night they put food on the table for people who were struggling to put food on the table. And the next morning came into work, same realities, didn't get his bonus, he's working for the same company. But his relative point of comparison had actually changed. And he was very grateful for the job he had, that he still had a job, that they were doing financially well, that his kids had a good education, that he had a good education. And what he had done is recognize that while the environment was exactly the same, the mindset about it shifted and allowed him to not only be more engaged to work, more productive, but to actually lead a team to become more successful. So I think it's seeing outliers like this, the people who are able to separate, that reminds us as possible. And then each time we take a step that helps us to deviate from just the external world, we realize we actually have a lot more power over our mindset than we normally recognize. Well, you know, as I'm listening to you say that, I think about sort of the guests that we've had here on our show. And I really, you know, I mean, I've had some of the most amazing people I could possibly think of it. By the time you guys are listening to this, you're going to have heard from our friend, Meg Wharton, who spent two years in federal prison and completely transformed her life. And I realized what we show people here is models of possibility. And really, you know, I was jokingly telling a friend the other day, last night, that, hey, you know, I'm working on developing my reality distortion field because I'm listening to this deep jobs biography again. And she says, isn't that called blood cast FM? And, you know, I jokingly said, she said, seriously, you distort people's reality with these stories. And I said, yeah, I guess that that's really true. You know, it's, it's interesting to hear you say this, because I think that, you know, one of the previous guests I had here was telling me we often we go into sort of new territory. And it's often based on rational thought and historical precedents. And you brought up this concept of divorcing yourself from your genetics, which in a lot of ways to me is like escaping your past. I've, you know, gotten to this point where I don't believe that past performance is necessarily an indicator of what's possible in the future and that we are capable of transforming. So, you know, let's talk specifics. I mean, because you talk a lot about a lot of these concepts in both the happiness advantage and and the new book. So I'd love for you to talk sort of, let's talk sort of starting point, you know, let's say you're working with me and sort of talking about, you know, sort of divorcing myself from the genetics and starting to, one, live in a new reality and then also live in a new reality and then take advantage of all the things that your research has led to. Well, first of all, on that first point about the people that you've been interviewing and that you've been exposing their ideas to the world, you're doing exactly what I do, which is we study and learn from positive outliers, people who are not average, people who are not doing what the normal person might be doing given their environment or given their genes, right? So that they have higher rates of, you know, that they might come from poverty, but they might do very well at school or they might have cancer, but they decide that they are going to start running marathons and they had never done that before. What we're finding, what we do is we study those people to find out what is it that they're doing that allows them to escape that gravity of their genes and we're finding a couple of things. First of all, what we have people to do is recognize that a lot of times we think unconsciously that we're just our genes or environment, but we ask people to go through and if I was talking to you now about this, I would say, you know, can you go back into certain places in your life where you had less than you had now but we're actually we're still happy? And oftentimes people would say, oh, you know, like, at this time when, like, you know, I was in college and just had no money, but I'd be so excited if something small happened, right? And what they can recognize is, okay, yes, there are places in my life where I was happier, even though I had less, you know, money or less positive environment. Somebody I just talked to said that he took his daughter on all these, it's a big CEO who took his daughter on all these amazing trips all over the world, you know, five-star hotels. And one time he, he decided to take her camping and they weren't really outdoors-type people and he, they got out and they got stuck in a rainstorm and in the middle of the rainstorm and they had to sit in their tent the entire weekend. And he was like, oh, that was a terrible disaster. It was a waste of time, like, she's gonna hate camping. Then at her wedding, she actually said in her speech that one of her favorite times she ever had with her father was a time when they just got to sit in a tent in the rain and just talk all weekend. So part of what it is is not necessarily about these environments that we thought things were going to be working out the way they would or the opposite. The other thing we have people recognize is if you are just your genes, then you shouldn't be changing very much, right? But we find people who are identical twins, who some of them have extremely high levels of optimism and happiness, and somebody with identical genes, same family, but has a completely different experience, a pessimistic or depressive view of the world. I just met an identical twin, well, I guess it's now low over a year ago, but she said that she was the optimistic one of her twins, but she used to be very depressed, negative and depressed. That was just comfort, genetic set point. And I said, oh, what did you do to get out of that? That's amazing. This is what I study, like, redoing gratitude exercises, where you like, you know, exercising a whole bunch. She was like, no, I was involved in a horrific car accident. And I lived through it and I realized that life was precious and that, you know, that had a whole new lease on life. And so here's somebody who a trauma induced a positive change from her genes. Once somebody recognizes that they don't have to just be their genes, then they start to experiment with it. And I think a lot of the people that we read biographies about are people who, you know, like Gandhi, who experiment with the truth. And they try and see if I make the small little change the way that interact with other people or with my habits, does this have a return on my investment? And will I keep doing it? And what we find is that the more people make these positive changes, what we're finding is that their genes and their environment don't constrain us as much as we thought. In other words, basically, to sum this up, what we found is that you will be just your genes, your environment, unless you make changes to your mindset and to your habits. But if you do the latter, what we find is you can deviate dramatically from that, that set point. And exactly what you're saying that our past successes don't have to predict what our future looks like. Well, you know, I think it's interesting you brought up trauma. And, you know, it's funny, because this is obviously like I was trying to find a common thread between a lot of our guests, and I was talking to a friend the other. And I said, you know what, I think I found it. I said, you know, we look at some of these people are radically successful. And like you said, are not ordinary. And I said, I have a common thread. And he said, what is it? I'm like, they've all been through a lot of pain. And it's really weird to think that. But I can honestly tell you that that is often the starting point for many of these journeys. You know, the other guest I was referring about, the historical president is a graffiti artist named Eric Wall, who we had here. And you know, one of the things he said to me is that when we experience this kind of a loss, one of our first tendencies is to turn to something that is self-destructive, right? Like alcohol, women, drugs, whatever it is. And what I'm curious about is that, one, if we don't have the trauma, can we create a catalyst in a life, two, if we do have the trauma, how do you make sure that you don't go the wrong direction with it? That's a great question. So I think it's twofold. Some people experience things that I would consider traumatic, and they don't even realize that it is traumatic. And they just go about their life the way that they happen in the past. So part of what I think is important is how your brain is conceiving of what you've gone through. So are you considering the challenges you have to be challenged or are you viewing them as threats? Are you viewing the things you're going through as traumas or as things you're learning about as you go about your daily life? What we found is that you can actually create positive change from either situation. We found people who, because they haven't experienced the trauma, that they continually believe that their behavior has prevented those traumas from happening, and so that they continue to make those positive changes which moves them in a positive direction. We also find people who have never had a trauma who are afraid of it, which is a mindset shift. It's the same reality, but on the one hand it could cause activation, and the other hand it could cause paralysis. So I think, again, the change is an internal change. But if somebody does experience a trauma, I think that we've all experienced, we've all experienced pain to some extent. We've all experienced a trauma to some extent. We get fascinated by it, which I didn't know about until I got into this research. I thought things were pretty clear when it came to trauma. A trauma is something that's absolutely negative, right? That we define as negative, that no one would argue as negative, but it turns out that it's sometimes, oh, so I thought, well, okay, a negative equals a negative outcome, right? So if you go through trauma, it will cause you to be debilitated, or if you're incredible, maybe you'd be resilient, and you end up just like you were before the trauma. And that trauma will be breast cancer, refugee displacement, combat, heart attack, whatever it is. It turns out that there's this special group of people, and there are a lot of them, who experience what's called post-traumatic growth, instead of post-traumatic stress. But what they experience is they grow not despite the trauma, but actually because of it. So an example would be I worked with a breast cancer support group or a survivor group, and one of the women said, "I wish I didn't have breast cancer," which I'm glad she said that, because that's a very realistic statement to make. But she said, "But because of this cancer, I have the deepest social support and connections I've ever had in my entire life of people here." So what she did was, instead of seeing this as something that's debilitated life, and she'll never get back to the place where she could have been without it, she actually sees that she's gone to a place where she couldn't have gone otherwise. And Eric Wall is another great example of that, and it sounds like a lot of your guests are like that. For myself, even one of the greatest things that happened to me was going through depression, because not only did it cause me to have more compassion for people who were going through depression and got me into positive psychology to figure out how we could change this, but it also taught me that we don't have to fear depression. 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I look back at the time post-business school when there were no jobs and I spent a year being unemployed and I thought it's the best damn thing that ever happened to me because I wouldn't have started this. As you were talking about finding times when you had a lot less where you were fairly happy, I remember thinking, "Wow, I was surviving on like four bucks a day and getting an allowance for my parents." The thing that kept me going was that I surfed all the time and I was spending six hours a day on the water and I was ecstatic any time I was in the water. Yeah, I think people have these experiences where they know real happiness that doesn't happen after one of the major successes that they think about in their life. I think that this is kind of the heart of at least the first book was the idea that oftentimes we think that happiness comes after some momentous moment within our life. We're after a purchase but really it's about that we can raise your success rates for the rest of your life and your happiness will actually remain the same or slightly go down. But if we flip around the order, if we can find some way of changing your mindset in the present to be grateful for the things you're experiencing to connect more deeply with people to see stress as a challenge, it turns out that all of your success rates rise dramatically that we've had the formula for what causes happiness backwards. Yeah, well I think that in our minds we have this sort of fictitious "I've made it" moment and what is really funny is that when you reach that goal, it always kind of falls short of what you thought you're like, "Wow, I finally have this moment." Like I remember the first time we got a sponsor for our show, I thought I was like, "Okay, that's going to be the moment in which everything is going to be perfect." And I was like, "Wow, this doesn't feel like what I thought it would." Like your mind kind of plays tricks on you that way, I think. Yeah, every time your brain has success, your brain changes the goal post of what success looks like every time, right? Beautiful. Beautiful. Yeah, and part of what we found is that it's true because I talk to people who are if you're talking about career change, I talk to people who are unemployed and they say, "Shawn, if I just had a job, I'd be so happy." But if people are thinking about a career change, that means they're not happy with them, their job oftentimes, right? That part of what we're seeing is the greatest rates of job dissatisfaction and the history of polling right now. And so part of what that means is that once you get something, your brain changes for what you're looking at. Like the good grades you might have gone in school doesn't make you happy every day for the rest of your life or getting into a good school or getting that raise or that promotion. Our brain needs to keep going. Now, I think that that actually could be something very valuable. Like what I really want people to do is to be grateful but aspirational at the same time. The last thing I want people to do is to equate happiness with the belief that you don't need to change. I think happiness is a belief you can change regardless of your genes or the environment or what you've been experiencing. And that happiness is more the joy that we feel striving towards our potential than it is for just being content for where we are right now. Well, let's shift gears a little bit and let's talk about applying these concepts on a day-to-day basis. I want to talk specifically about productivity and habit change only because I can tell you your work is instrumental in me being able to write a thousand words a day consistently. Like a lot of habits that I created were based on a lot of concepts in the happiness advantage. And I've even written, you know, referenced them in blog posts that I've written. But I'd love for you to talk about sort of bringing your research on a day-to-day basis and applying it into a framework of like being productive and consistently changing our habits with our work. Because, you know, if you think about this, most people listening to this are creative entrepreneurs who do a lot of creative work. And I think that some of this is a mystery to them because it doesn't seem like you're going to be consistent. Like we look at creativity and as these sort of sudden bursts of inspiration. But I can tell you your work has definitely taught me how to do certain things consistently. And I'd love for you to talk about that. That's fascinating. I just read a book called Inside the Box. And it is a whole book on creativity that I think mirrors what I've been doing in happiness, which is it turns out both happiness and creativity both follow very predictable patterns. Right? That once you learn those patterns, once you break that code, you can actually not only study happiness and creativity, but you can practice them and get better at them. What we thought initially was optimism was just something that was genetic until we learned, you know, this is now two decades old research, but we now know we can teach or you can learn optimism just like you learn how to do a math problem and learn how to swing a golf club. Part of the way that you can do that is you actually create habits in your life. You know, I think that most people, a lot of people think that, you know, from the Divinity School days, we've learned in Christianity, that faith without works is dead. And what that means is if you have a mindset change, but you're not making a behavioral change, it doesn't work for very long, right? We're like, okay, great. I'm going to be happy in the present. Well, you're not going to be able to sustain that unless you're actually practicing the things to create greater levels of happiness. So in my books, what I try to do is research what are very small interventions you can make in your life over the course of your daily experience that could actually cause an effect to your productivity levels, your happiness levels. Some of the ones we found in the past were very simple, just, you know, two minutes of every day, starting your work with writing down three new things you were grateful for that occurred over the previous 24 hours or journaling for just two minutes about a positive meaningful experience was one of the fastest interventions we found for helping people recognize that there was meaning already embedded within their life. But within those two minutes, what happened was that they do it for 21 days in a row. Their brain connects these dots. And you suddenly find this whole trajectory of meaning running throughout your life. We have people exercise, which is basically a gateway drug for the brain. Once you exercise, your brain believes your behavior matters and you start making these entire constellations of positive habits around you. We got people at Google to meditate for two minutes a day, just watching their breath going in and out, and their accuracy rates improve, their stress levels dropped. And then the most powerful one from the previous research we were doing was we got people for 21 days in a row to just write every morning start with a two minute positive email praising or thanking one person that they knew. That could be a family member, friend, an old teacher that they had. I wrote to a high school English teacher one time and just said thank you for making me fall in love with reading. You're the reason I wrote a book in the first place. Each one of those two minutes seems very small, but it turns out you spend the entire rest of the day thinking about how amazing you were for writing that email. But then you get these positive emails back from other people, it creates the cycle where we find that it increases your social support, your social connection, which is we found that social connection is not only the greatest predictor of happiness, it's more important to your success rates than your IQ and your collective years of experience at a task, and we found that the social support is as predictive of how long you'll live as obesity, high blood pressure, and smoking. Which means we, I mean if you think about that for just a minute, it's the revolution you're talking about. Like we fight so hard as a society, we have magazines devoted to how you can, you know, not gain weight, but we forget about how powerful just two minutes of positive could actually be. But that's sort of like a daily habit type idea. One of the things we've been looking for, how do we speed ourselves towards our goal based upon the way that we think about it? And I came across this researcher who I initially done an intro psychology read about, who is this guy named Clark Hull, who back in the 30s, this guy went through everything negative you could think of. Like if he was still alive, you would love to have him on your show, because this guy had, you know, like he went through every disease imaginable as a child, and then he gets into a PhD program for psychology and gets polio. He can't afford to, you know, buy a brace so he has to make a metal brace himself. And this guy, because he had to go through so much in his life, look for these small little patterns that he could do or observe the people were doing in their lives that made them successful. And if he could just replicate them, that it would help him even more. This guy ended up 70% of all psychology articles in the 1940s, all cited his research. This guy dominated the academic world after doing this, because he realized that small changes were the ones that had the greatest amount of effect upon people's lives. One thing he found was that rats in a maze run much faster at the end of the maze, which doesn't seem like that, that great a discovery, but fast forward to to business schools nowadays, they found that if you have those coffee cards, where if you buy 10 cups of coffee, you get a free cup of coffee, they gave people cards with 12 stamps you needed to get a free cup of coffee, but they gave you two free stamps on them. What they found was that that cost people to buy coffee a ton more. The reason being is that people, when they looked at those cars in the latter category, they're one-sixth of the way done. They've had one-sixth of the progress already made, whereas in the first category, they're starting at zero. They have to buy 10 cups of coffee before getting that free cup of coffee. What we found is that your brain accelerates towards goals based upon how much progress you perceive you made in the past and how close you are to that actual goal. The way that we take these ideas and put them into our lives is we found that if somebody's writing all the tasks they need to do during the day, many of the creative entrepreneurs you're working with do this. About 10, 10, 30 in the morning, we sit down and we're like, "Okay, I just got to write down all the things I need to do today because I know I have a lot to do." Then we write down all the things we need to do after that point. When we do that, we're actually starting at zero. What we happen is that when they write those checklists of all the tasks they need to do, they have to include the progress that they've made. They woke up this morning, maybe they had breakfast with their kids, they've already called a client, they read an article that might be helpful to them. They've got four checks on their checklist before they even go to the fifth item, and those victories cause the brain to continue moving forward. What we find is people accelerate towards getting all that work done. What we look for are these small, simple patterns that actually create creative levels of success in our lives. Awesome. I love it. For those of you guys listening, I can tell you, I have put some of this stuff to work in. As far as your bit on gratitude, there's even an app for that now, which I'm sure you've probably heard of, Sean, because your research is probably responsible for that app. It's actually called Happier. Super cool app. I just wrote about it on our blog. It's amazing. We're starting to see so much more of a connection between technology, our daily habits, and this. I love the whole movement. We're starting to quantify ourselves. We're looking at keeping track of what we're doing. It could be as simple as keeping track of how many sneezes we've had. People have been looking for patterns and that, but we're also looking for, I found, here's a small example, I did that meditation one. The other habits were easy for me. Meditate and just watching my breath go in and out. I think we've developed a form of cultural attention deficit disorder, where we're so overstimulated by so much noise. Our brains are just so used to it. When it came time for meditation, I just couldn't get myself to do it. I had a friend who meditated in India for five weeks, and was silent the whole time, and I was like, "That sounds like hell dude." I was like, "I can't even do it for five minutes." I set my iPhone alarm one time to do it for five minutes, and when it went off, I found myself up at my laptop. I had auto piloted doing that, and I didn't need to, but when I tried doing the meditation, what I found was, I'd finish it. I'd be like, "Okay, it's been two minutes later. I don't feel any different." I feel exactly like the same person I was before, except now two minutes behind, but I found that the days that only on those days, I would have, like, I'd be taking a shower or going for a walk, and I'd suddenly have an insight that I hadn't thought of before. You know, there's like, "Aha, moments, there's eureka experiences." I felt like I had those, and when I recorded them, I'd have them on the day so when I meditated, which is exactly what we found when we did the neuroscience for this, when they found that meditation increases the gamma waves in the brain, which, when those are actually at the highest level, we found those correspond with those eureka experiences that people have, and what we're basically doing, when we do these small positive habits, it seemed like nothing, like doing three things you're grateful for each day, or writing a two-minute positive email. What you're doing, if you're actually training something so fundamental to the human brain about how it views the world, that you're actually creating what we're now calling unconscious positive genius, where some of the, you know, people like Einstein and Poincare, when they come up with the, when they both simultaneously came up with theories of relativity, they didn't do it in like a laboratory, or at a chalkboard, where they were doing formulas. One guy was walking on a cliff, and he just suddenly felt like the whole thing just appeared to him, and he wasn't even thinking about relativity at the time, and for Einstein, he was just in a street car coming over from a party, just frustrated that he couldn't solve things, and looked up at a clock tower, and suddenly when his brain was not consciously focused on the task, but had been trained by all that work that he had put into this in the past thinking about this, it turns out unconscious brain rate was able to see patterns that we couldn't see with the conscious brain, and that's what we're finding with these people, is you can literally create positive genius by using small patterns in our lives. Yeah, I can tell you my eureka moments always come when I'm surfing. That's no secret to anybody who's listening to the show, because I've mentioned it a thousand times, but yeah, you know, it's funny, I think some of my favorite ones, some of the things that you talked about in the first book, were the positive Tetris effect, which effectively is, it sounds like what you're kind of describing here on a much bigger scale. The other one, you know, I'd love for you to touch on this briefly, just because it made such a profound transformation for me was that concept of activation energy, I was blown away, like to me, I was like, that was the key to writing a thousand words a day, like it did everything, such a simple idea that radically trained changed my ability to get things done. It's great. So in writing both the happiness advantage and before happiness, both of them, I did exactly that strategy, like I would write for a thousand words a day, and that's it, and it sounds like it's slow and plodding, because you have to write so many pages, but it turns out that that approach, it works so well, but you have to get it so that it becomes easier. One thing we found is when we were researching the uptake on these positive habits that, you know, after I give a talk, people were like, oh, yeah, I'm going to make these positive habits, we get them to agree to, and sometimes even sign their name to do these positive habits, but unless they make those positive habits easier to do, their success rate is actually lower than it would have been otherwise. So the activation energy is simply this, we found that, you know, I had a guitar that I wanted to be playing, it was in a case in my closet, and I never played it, and I made this habit grid of playing the guitar for 21 days in a row, and then never played it, I played it like three times during the 21 days. So I bought a $2 used guitar stand, took the guitar out of the case in closet, which saved me about 20 seconds and put the guitar in the middle of my common room and tried the experiment again. And what I found was that I played the guitar actually not only every day, but multiple times a day when I'd be walking through, I'd just see it and be like, oh, I'd pick it up and play a song and then go on to do something else. What we found is that if you change the energy level, so back in chemistry and physics in high school, there's a concept called activation energy, which is in order to create a change in a formula to catalyze a reaction in your life, there's this initial investment of energy required at the beginning, and if you can change the energy it takes to start a task, you're likely ahead of doing it changes. So if you make positive habits easier and negative habits harder to do by three to 20 seconds, what we find is your success rate at changing your patterns skyrockets. So we got people to, you know, like, I wanted to stop watching TV. So I took the batteries out of my remote control and took them 20 seconds away to my bedroom and left the batteries there. And what we found is, and then I just changed the patterns in my room, I put work beside me that I needed to do, or I put a book beside me that I've been really wanting to read, or I had my guitar right there. And what I found was my brain wanted to follow the path of least resistance, so it didn't turn on the TV. I didn't want to walk all the way there and actually gain back about two conscious hours to my day. I'm still watching TV when it mattered, but about two conscious hours per day on an average was 14 conscious hours a week. I got back by making myself less time efficient, right? Or flipping around one thing said we found with the 22nd rule is that if you want to make a positive habit, I wanted to exercise in the morning, but I tried literally for like a year and a half and failed at it until one night, I got frustrated, moved my athletic shoes right next to my bed, put a workout routine on the wall, and then for the 21 days and only 21 days, I just went to sleep in my gym clothes for the next morning. So what I do the next morning was roll out of bed and put my feet, which already had socks on them right into the shoes, and I was up exercising. Basically what we found that if we can get somebody to put a participant to put on workout clothes and workout shoes, something switches in their brain where they think it's easier to go workout now than it is to take all the stuff back off again, which is crazy because you have to anyway, but our brain follows the path of these resistance. So if you if you walked around my house right now or my office and you were looking for it, you could actually see patterns where I've tried to make it easier for me to pick up on the positive habits and harder for my brain to go down that path of the negative, even as simple as you know, changing where I put desktop icons on my laptop or changing where I put fruit in my house or where the guitar is or any of these types of things. Yeah, I'll add one example for those of you guys who want to develop the writing habit. I literally, so I use a distraction free writing tool called Mac Journal, and I found that by setting it up all the night before, like when I turn on the screen in the morning, the first thing I see is this black screen and green text. Sometimes I'll even type now that I'm talking to you, I may even type a few words the night before just to have words on the screen. Now that I heard about that other part about the goal, but that was mind-blowing what it did. I mean, I also use an app called self-control to avoid distracting websites, but a combination of all those things is really mind-blowing. So really, really cool stuff. Let's just for just a second, let's shift gears a little bit and we'll start wrapping things up because I know you got to go in here. One of the things that's interesting is that you've tied all this together and you've built a business out of it, which obviously people doing any kind of creative work are going to be interested in that component of it. I guess for me, the part that really is interesting is that you've taken something that I would imagine for the most part, and I've even read about it in your books, that people kind of see with a bit of resistance and sort of could be written off as this is kind of hokey, a new age, and a little woo, and you've translated it into something tactical and a practical for the business world. And I'm curious, one, how you've done that, and two, what are the implications of that for people who are listening? Explaining football to the friend who's just there for the nachos, hard. Tailgating from home like a pro with snacks and drinks everyone will love, any easy win. And with Instacart helping deliver the snack time MVPs to your door, you're ready for the game in as fast as 30 minutes. So you never miss a play or lose your seat on the couch or have to go head to head for the last chicken wing. Shop game day faves on Instacart and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three gross reorders. Offer valid for a limited time, other fees in terms apply. Ryan Reynolds here for, I guess, my 100th mint commercial. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, no. Honestly, when I started this, I thought I'd only have to do like four of these. I mean, it's unlimited premium wireless for $15. How are there still people paying two or three times that much? I'm sorry, I shouldn't be victim blaming here. Give it a try at midmobile.com/switch whatever you're ready. $45 up from payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only, taxes and fees extra, speeds lower above 40 gigabytes of CD tails. Expand the way you work and think with Claude by anthropic. Whether brainstorming solo or working with the team, Claude is AI built for you. It's perfect for analyzing images and graphs, generating code, processing multiple languages, and solving complex problems. Plus, Claude is incredibly secure, trustworthy, and reliable, so you can focus on what matters. Curious? Visit claud.ai and see how Claude can elevate your work. Discover Hydro, the best kept secret in fitness. Hydro is the state-of-the-art at-home rower that engages 86% of your muscles, delivering the ultimate full-body workout in just 20 minutes. From advanced to beginner, Hydro has over 500 classes shot worldwide and taught by Olympians and world-class athletes. For a 30-day risk-free trial, go to hydro.com and use code ROW450 to save $450 on a Hydro Pro Rower. That's H-Y-D-R-O-W.com code ROW450. This is a mini-meditation guided by Bombas. Repeat after me. I'm comfy, comfy. I'm cozy, cozy. I have zero blisters on my toes, blisters. And that's because I wear Bombas. The softest sucks underwear and t-shirts that give back. One purchased equals one donated. Now go to bombas.com/acast and use code ACAST for 20% off your first purchase. That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com/acast and use code ACAST at checkout. I really believe the research is useless unless it's lived. So part of what I found was that as I was doing this research, when I did it myself, it worked. And so it gave me more of a persuasive ability to say, you know, to other people, yes, actually this works. But in order to persuade people to try out these ideas, not only did I have to do the research behind it, so we took a field that didn't have a lot of research in it and tried to build that up, right? So if you have like self-help or like more woo-woo ideas as you're mentioning, if you could provide research for it, you've now got validation for something that we've been hearing in the past or a rejection of some of the things we thought were true. But we also have to test it out in the real world. We have to test it in the hardest possible places. So we would do it in the midst of a banking crisis. We would do it in the midst of people losing their jobs or losing their homes or going through cancer or getting MS. And what we found was that we didn't find an environment where this didn't work. And we found that it worked for people who are 84 years of age down to four years of age as we were doing this. So part of what that meant was we need to get this information out as much as possible to the masses. I think the thing that we credit the success that we've seen so far, getting this message out, is that I think that as people start to try this out for themselves and the greatest supporters of it have been the people who are actually critics of it, who then tried some of these positive changes in their life that were in the happiness advantage. And suddenly they become the biggest champions of this inside their organization, with their family members, with their teams. So part of what we've been really looking for are those people who are not only outliers, but people who could spread the message even more. But I think where this dovetails with whatever industry you're actually in as an entrepreneur, what we found is the greatest predictor of entrepreneurial success is your optimism. The article I did for the Harvard Business Review was that we found that the greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy is a positive and engaged brain. It's not actually about your IQ, it's not even about your emotional intelligence, social intelligence. It's your ability to connect your multiple intelligences together into a positive reality that you're able to continually architect. So part of what we were finding was that if somebody was optimistic, they were not only able to overcome those setbacks and turn them into successes, but it turns out that they were able to see possibilities so that people didn't even see in the past. And they have incredible studies of this. They found people who are optimistic. They actually find if you give them a newspaper with the opportunity in it, whether you're counting the number, they give people newspapers, they have you count the number of photographs in it. Before you do that, you ask them if they're optimistic and if they think the good things seem to happen to them or if they're pessimistic and they're pretty unlucky. It turns out that the optimists as they're doing this, while they're counting the number of pictures, every newspaper in a big block letter says, "Stop the experiment now and we'll give you 20 or 50 dollars depending on the experiment." And then we found out that the majority of the optimists see the opportunity, stop the experiment and make the money, whereas the majority of the pessimists actually continued the experiment and kept counting the photographs. And what is an indication of is your brain when it's positive actually lets in more opportunities for your brain to process and then to pounce upon. So one of the best ways to actually be more successful in the future is to flip around the happiness success formula. Find a way in the present to train your brain to have higher levels of optimism or social connection or see stress in your life as a challenge instead of as a threat and every single business and educational outcome improves dramatically. Awesome. Well Sean, I know you've got to get going here so I'm going to wrap with my final question for you and I jokingly call this the research for the book that I don't know that I'm going to write. This is something that I've asked a lot of people and given that your research happiness and study what makes people kind of thrive. I'm really curious, you know, we live in this sort of fascinating world where I always say the adult world is like a kindergarten classroom and we've got our box of crayons back and you know the people on our show are like you said extraordinary, they're sort of outliers. And what I'm wondering in your mind, you know, with all these opportunities at our disposal, you know, there are certain people who go out and they just really kind of blow things out of the water, achieve at the highest levels, I mean thriving movements, speaking gigs, book deals, everything. And then there's, you know, people who kind of look at that and aspire to do that, but they don't quite get there. And I'm curious what you think is the differentiating factor between those two groups. I mean, I, by far, so this is a question we asked, we we wondered, we started this question with a chicken or the egg question, which is, which happens first, are people successful and then they're happy or are they happy then they're successful. We've actually answered that pretty soundly. What we found is that when your brain is positive, it's the greatest predictor of your success in the long run. So if I was looking for what the common thread is for people who are extremely successful, everyone's got external challenges, everyone's got different levels of intelligence, different genetic challenges that they're experiencing. But what we find is that given whatever cards you're dealt, we find that there are these people that seem to have this Midas touch. And it seems to be caused by them being able to do basically them being able to do a couple things. First of all, well, the main thing I would wrap it all into this is that they're able to continually architect positive and successful realities based upon true information in the world. The reason why we add in that last part about true facts or information is that some people, you know, they put vision boards up of what they really want to do with their life. And we've heard lots of that, but we actually find that some vision boards decrease future progress. Because one, we cut out pictures or like put up visions of people that are so wildly successful that when we look at our lives in comparison, we oftentimes think, oh, I can't quite get there. There's a great cartoon somebody sent me on Twitter that has this, it's a rhinoceros on a treadmill running as fast as possible can and looking up at a poster on like a vision board of a beautiful unicorn. It's just sweating and so frustrated. And it's not trying to be a rhinoceros, it was trying to be a unicorn. What we're finding is that if you have an irrational type of optimism where you sugarcoat the present, you'll actually make bad decisions for the future and you won't succeed at the highest possible levels. Some of the CEOs I worked with, I worked with this one who was actually successful, but he told me that he doesn't work seatbelts because he's actually an optimist. That's not optimism, that's insane. That's irrational optimism and that's part of the problem. Sometimes we read books that say things like, wow, if you just change your mindset, then you have all the successes you need in the world. And we need to actually make the behavioral steps as well that get us there and we need to be realistic about the present. So that means being realistic about both the positive and negative in the present. But at the same time, and this is the key, this is the key actually to entrepreneurial success is why optimism is the highest predictor of it is that while you're being taking a realistic assessment of the present, you're maintaining the belief through all of it that your behavior actually matters. And I love that because when we think about people that have been these positive outliers, not only the people around the show, but like people who are so important to the lives we now, like Martin Luther King Jr., or Gandhi, or Mother Teresa, they're not people that we normally think about as being happy, go lucky, right? But they believed that their behavior mattered. They believed that if I did non-violent resistance, this positive response will actually eventually cause the success that I want. And we find that those are the people that continue on the longest at the highest rates of success and are able to not only create a positive reality for themselves, but they're able to transfer that positive reality to other people. Awesome. Well, Sean, I'm not even going to touch it. That was absolutely fabulous. First off, let me say it's been my absolute pleasure to have you here as a guest on Blogcast FM. And like I said, ever since I discovered your work, I've been wanting to have you on the show. So I was really, really excited to have you here. I can't thank you enough for taking the time to join us and share some of your insights with our listeners. All right. 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A look at Shawn’s early work in religion and spirituality
Why positive brains lead to better outcomes
The opportunity to choose between multiple careers
Why you don’t have the meditate for 7 years to be happy
Divorcing yourself from your genetic makeup
How to make changes to your habits by tapping into past success
Making a mindset shift to separate happiness from your environment
Why we study and learn from positive outliers
Going to back to places when you had less than now but were happy
Why genetics and environment don’t indicate our potential
How People Experience Post Traumatic Growth
Learning how to become more optimistic and productive
Ideas for spying yourself towards your goal
Scientifically proven tips for becoming happier
Why small changes have the greatest impact on our lives
How to rock your to do list
Putting the concept of activation energy to work
Why vision boards usually don’t work for people

Shawn Achor is the author of Before Happiness and The Happiness Advantage. He is also a positive psychology researcher, speaker and founder of GoodThink, Inc.

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