The Happiness Advantage - Shawn Achor

Here are some thoughts I gleaned from Shawn's book that grabbed my attention.

I loved how he acknowledged so many people who made it possible for him to write this book. The fact that it was moments of being happy and humbled when he kept being reminded that he was loved and that we do nothing alone. 

They even seem too busy, too preoccupied, and too stressed to reach out for love

What a keen observation - it even happens to me at the best of times - and I miss out on receiving love or even in giving it away.

In their pursuit of high achievement, they had isolated themselves from their peers and loved ones and thus compromised the very support systems they so ardently needed.

I have an associate I work with who believes so much in success at work that he pushes those he loves away. They cannot even approach him with a proposal to be loved because he responds with successful work comes the ability to do these things, so please, allow me to work. However, work never yields to love and he becomes lonely for love. When lonely for love, love then becomes demanding and is no longer patient.

The chief engine of happiness is positive emotions, since happiness is, above all else, a feeling. In fact, some researchers prefer the term “positive emotions” or “positivity” to “happiness” because, while they are essentially synonymous, happiness is a far more vague and unwieldy term. Barbara Fredrickson, a researcher at the University of North Carolina and perhaps the world’s leading expert on the subject, describes the ten most common positive emotions: “joy, gratitude, serenity, interest, hope, pride, amusement, inspiration, awe, and love.” This paints a far richer picture of happiness than that ubiquitous yellow smiley face, which doesn’t leave much room for nuance.

 The most important of the positive emotions is love. Love actually is the binding agent that fuses the others together to make them life changing.

Think about your office: What feelings does it inspire? People who flank their computers with pictures of loved ones aren’t just decorating— they’re ensuring a hit of positive emotion each time they glance in that direction.

I remember, not too long ago, a team member walked into my office asking where the photos of my family were. I thought that it was odd that I did not need one or that it was assumed that I should have one. So I did frame one and brought it in. Then the picture did not change for a couple of years and the same team member walked in and asked for an update. Too funny. But as I read this quote I realized that there is a sense of connection with thought and emotion. A few years later and I love putting family photos on my smartphone screen. Right now there is one of my newest granddaughter (I have 3). I can tell you that this photo has brought me through some tough times.

One of the longest-running psychological studies of all time—the Harvard Men study—followed 268 men from their entrance into college in the late 1930s all the way through the present day.1 From this wealth of data, scientists have been able to identify the life circumstances and personal characteristics that distinguished the happiest, fullest lives from the least successful ones. In the summer of 2009, George Vaillant, the psychologist who has directed this study for the last 40 years, told the Atlantic Monthly that he could sum up the findings in one word: “love—full stop.” Could it really be so simple? Vaillant wrote his own follow-up article that analyzed the data in great detail, and his conclusions proved the same: that there are “70 years of evidence that our relationships with other people matter, and matter more than anything else in the world.”

This study has always intrigued me, probably because of its incredible depth. There are other rabbit trails from this study that are also amazing but this one focusing on "love" was priceless.