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What it argues
Shawn Achor's core claim inverts a common assumption about success and happiness. Most people believe that success leads to happiness — achieve the goal, then feel good. Achor argues the research runs the other way: positive affect precedes and enables better performance. A brain primed toward positivity processes more possibilities, solves problems faster, and sustains effort longer than one in neutral or negative states.
The book draws on Achor's decade of research at Harvard and his work as a consultant teaching positive psychology principles to employees at companies including UBS and KPMG. He presents seven principles, among them the Tetris Effect (training the brain to scan for positives rather than deficits), the Fulcrum and Lever (mindset as the lever that shifts how much power you have on a given task), and the 20-Second Rule (reducing the friction for desired behaviors by making them just slightly easier to initiate than the alternatives you want to avoid).
What it gets right
- 1.
Happiness is not the result of success; it's a precondition for it. A positive brain outperforms a neutral one on nearly every measure of intelligence and creativity.
- 2.
The Tetris Effect: what you practice attending to shapes what you see. Train your brain to scan for positives and it will find them; train it to scan for threats and it will find those instead.
- 3.
The Fulcrum and Lever principle: changing your mindset about a task changes how much energy and skill you bring to it, independent of the task itself.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Shawn Achor is a positive psychology researcher and speaker who spent over a decade as a faculty member and researcher at Harvard University. He is the founder of GoodThink, a consulting firm that has delivered positive psychology training to Fortune 500 companies in over 50 countries. He is also the author of Before Happiness and Big Potential, and his TED Talk on the happy secret to better work has been viewed tens of millions of times.
