Happiness comes after you’ve reached your goals. You’ll be happy once you’ve achieved success. Right? Apparently not!

Positive psychology – a relatively new field started in 1998 by psychologist Martin Seligman – has turned that common idea inside out. Happiness leads to success. Research has shown that optimism, makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative, and productive, which fuels performance and achievement.

In The Happiness Advantage, author Shawn Achor shows us the many ways happiness leads to positive outcomes and gives us practical principles to actively cultivate optimism. He gives us hope that – with some effort – we can rewire our brains to change our outlook, and set ourselves up to reap the multiple benefits of happiness.

Just reading this book has given me a good dose of optimism. After growing up thinking that I had to struggle and grind away to reach happiness through (eventual but still uncertain) success, I now feel like there is a different path. Equipped with Achor’s principles and the research and lessons he shares, I can change my approach to life for a better outlook.

But there’s more. Achor goes on to show that by becoming happier and more optimistic myself, I could have a positive impact on the people around me. He calls this the “ripple effect.” As someone who is naturally more anxious worry wart, I now know to make a more conscious effort to be a “happier” person for the benefit of my friends, family, coworkers, and the greater community.

I don’t think these are just hippy-dippy words of advice. I am making a conscious effort to put Achor’s principles into action. I’ve started a daily gratitude practice and will try to foster deeper connections with people in my everyday interactions. I’m excited to see where these new habits may lead.

Click below to see my notes on the seven principles presented in The Happiness Advantage.

Principle 1: The Happiness Advantage

• 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. Success was thought to be the fixed point of the work universe, with happiness revolving around it. Now, thanks to breakthroughs in the burgeoning field of positive psychology, we are learning that the opposite is true. When we are happy —when our mindset and mood are positive—we are smarter, more motivated, and thus more successful. Happiness is the center, and success revolves around it.
• Happiness can improve our physical health, which in turn keeps us working faster and longer and therefore makes us more likely to succeed.
• Positive emotions broaden the amount of possibilities we process, making us more thoughtful, creative, and open to new ideas. Positive emotions flood our brains with dopamine and serotonin, chemicals that not only make us feel good, but dial up the learning centers of our brains to higher levels. They help us organize new information, keep that information in the brain longer, and retrieve it faster later on. And they enable us to make and sustain more neural connections, which allows us to think more quickly and creatively, become more skilled at complex analysis and problem solving, and see and invent new ways of doing things.
• People who put their heads down and wait for work to bring eventual happiness put themselves at a huge disadvantage, while those who capitalize on positivity every chance they get come out ahead.

Principle 2: The Fulcrum and the Lever

• Our power to maximize our potential is based on two important things: (1) the length of our lever – how much potential power and possibility we believe we have, and (2) the position of our fulcrum – the mindset with which we generate the power to change. It’s not the weight of the world that determines what we can accomplish. It is our fulcrum and lever.
• Beliefs can actually change the concrete results of our efforts and our work. The mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, defines our reality.
• Just as your mindset about work affects your performance, so too does your mindset about your own ability. The more you believe in your own ability to succeed, the more likely it is that you will. When faced with a difficult task or challenge, give yourself an immediate competitive advantage by focusing on all the reasons you will succeed, rather than fail. Remind yourself of the relevant skills you have, rather than those you lack.
• Yale psychologist Amy Wrzesniewski found employees have three “work orientations”: job, career, and calling. People with a calling view work as an end in itself; their work is fulfilling not because of external rewards but because they feel it contributes to the greater good, draws on their personal strengths, and gives them meaning and purpose.
  • The calling orientation can have just as much to do with mindset as it does with actual work being done. Even the smallest tasks can be imbued with greater meaning when they are connected to personal goals and values. The more we align our daily tasks with our personal vision, the more likely we are to see work as a calling.

Principle 3: The Tetris Effect

• Negative Tetris Effect: a cognitive pattern that decreases our overall success rates. We can retrain this to scan for the good things in life – to help us see more possibility, to feel more energy, and to succeed at higher levels.
  The Positive Tetris Effect: Scan the world for possibilities and ideas that allow our success rate to grow.
• When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism.
• Consistently grateful people are more energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely. Gratitude has been proven to be a significant cause of positive outcomes.
• Optimists set more goals (and more difficult goals) than pessimists, and put more effort into attaining those goals, stay more engaged in the face of difficulty, and rise above obstacles more easily. Optimists also cope better in high stress situations and are better able to maintain high levels of well-being during times of hardship – all skills that are crucial to high performance in a demanding work environment.
• Make a daily list of the good things in your job, your career, and your life. This trains the brain to become more skilled at noticing and focusing on possibilities for personal and professional growth, and seizing opportunities to act on them.
• The key is not to completely shut out all the bad, all the time, but to have a reasonable, realistic, healthy sense of optimism.

Principle 4: Falling Up

• If we are able to conceive of a failure as an opportunity for growth, we are all the more likely to experience that growth. Conversely, if we conceive of a fall as the worst thing in the world, it becomes just that.
  • Jim Collins: we are not imprisoned by our circumstances, our setbacks, our history, our mistakes, or even staggering defeats along the way. We are freed by our choices.
• People’s ability to find the path up rests largely on how they conceive the cards they have been dealt. Positive reinterpretation of the situation or event, optimism, acceptance, and coping mechanisms that include focusing on the problem head-on (rather than trying to avoid or deny it) help people find the path up.
• People who define themselves not by what has happened to them, but by what they can make out of what has happened are the ones who can most successfully get themselves up off the mat. They use adversity to find the path forward.
• It’s not the adversity itself, but what we do with it that determines our fate. Some will sit helpless, while others gather their wits, capitalizes on their strengths, and forge ahead.
• People with an optimistic explanatory style interpret adversity as being local and temporary while those with a pessimistic explanatory style see these events as more global and permanent. How we choose to explain the nature of past events has a crucial impact on our happiness and future success.
• Success is more than simple resilience. It’s about using that downward momentum to propel ourselves in the opposite direction. It’s about capitalizing on setbacks and adversity to become even happier, even more motivated, and even more successful.

Principle 5: The Zorro Circle

• One of the biggest drivers of success is the belief that our behavior matters; that we have control over our future. Yet when our stresses and workloads seem to mount faster than our ability to keep up, feelings of control are often the first things to go, especially when we try to tackle too much at once. If, however, we first concentrate our efforts on small manageable goals, we regain the feeling of control so crucial to performance. By limiting the scope of our efforts, then watching those efforts have the intended effect, we accumulate the resources, knowledge, and confidence to expand the circle, gradually conquering a larger and larger area.
• Gains in productivity, happiness, and health have less to do with how much control we actually have and more with how much control we think we have.
  • Most successful people, in work and in life, are those who have what psychologists call an “internal locus of control,” the belief that their actions have a direct effect on their outcomes. People with an external locus, on the other hand, are more likely to see daily events as dictated by external forces.
  • Any internal locus lowers jobs stress and turnover, and leads to higher motivation, organizational commitment, and task performance. “Internals” have even stronger relationships – better at communicating, problem-solving, and working to achieve mutual goals. They are also more attentive listeners and more adept at social interactions.
• Psychologist Richard Davidson found that in resilient individuals, the prefrontal cortex rapidly won over the limbic system; in other words, the Thinker took over almost immediately from the Jerk.
• Let go of the stresses that are you of your hands. Focus your energy on the areas where your efforts will have a real impact.

Principle 6: The 20-Second Rule

• Habits form because our brain actually changes in response to frequent practice.
• Lower the activation energy for habits you want to adopt and raise it for habits you want to avoid. The more we can lower or even eliminate the activation energy for our desired actions, the more we enhance our ability to jump-start positive change.
• Setting rules in advance can free us from the constant barrage of willpower-depleting choices that make a real difference in our lives. Rules are especially helpful during the first few days of a behavior-changing venture, when it’s easier to stray off course. Gradually, as the desired action becomes more habitual, we can become more flexible.

Principle 7: Social Investment

• n the midst of challenges and stress at work, nothing is more crucial to our success than holding on to the people around us. Successful people hold tighter to their social support instead of turning inward. Instead of divesting, they invest. Not only are these people happier, but they are more productive, engaged, energetic and resilient. They know that their social relationships are the single greatest investment they can make in the Happiness Advantage.
• The more social support you have, the happier you are. The happier you are, the more advantages you accrue in nearly every domain of life.
• Investing in social connections means that you’ll find it easier to interpret adversity as a path to growth and opportunity; and when you do have to experience stress, you’ll bounce back from it faster and better protected against its long-term negative effects.
• The more team members are encouraged to socialize and interact face-to-face, the more engaged they feel, the more energy they have, and the longer they can stay focused on a task. In short, the more the team members invest in their social cohesion, the better the results of their work.
• Not only do we need to invest in new relationships, we should always be reinvesting in our current relationships because social support networks grow stronger the longer they are held.
• How we support people during good times, more than bad times, affects the quality of a relationship. Sharing upbeat news with someone is called “capitalization,” and it helps multiply the benefits of the positive event as well as strengthen the bond between the two people involved. The winning response is both active and constructive; it offers enthusiastic support, as well as specific comments and follow-up questions.