200 Word Review: The Happiness Advantage

If the cover doesn’t make you smile, the premise will. It turns upside down the guiding principal in our culture that says if you work hard, you will succeed, and if you succeed, you’ll be happy. Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage, uses wisdom and years of research and consulting in business and the correlation between happiness and success to provide practical ways to transform your own life and workplace.

He writes, “For untold generations, we have been led to believe that happiness orbited around success. That if we work hard enough, we will be successful, and only if we are successful will we become happy. …we are learning that the opposite is true.”

Achor provides seven principles which will help to change your mindset. For example, his discussion of the “Fulcrum and the Lever” demonstrates this power of positivity. “I thought about how I was defining the task… and consciously changed it… I also changed the language I used to describe the activity to other people. After telling a few friends I was at Starbucks reading for pleasure, I started to realize that in fact I was.”

In the end, you’ll find these principles reach far beyond your own life. Referred to as the “Ripple Effect,” Achor shows how both happiness and success can be contagious.

It is a book I was happy to read.

How are you using the happiness advantage to transform your life and workplace?

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