Great Throughts Treasury

"As your success rises in your life, your happiness levels will actually remain about the same. But flip around the formula, if you can get people to deepen the social connection they feel, the meaning embedded in the relationships, the breadth and depth of the relationships, if you change and raise their levels of optimism, if you get people to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat, when our brain is positive first, every single educational outcome and business outcome we can test for rises dramatically, and our success rates rise."

"Commit Conscious Acts of Kindness."

"Being successful doesn?t make you happier. Being happy makes you more successful."

"Beliefs are so powerful because they dictate our efforts and actions. This is why Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leader in the scientific study of well-being, has written that she prefers the phrase ?creation or construction of happiness? to the more popular ?pursuit,? since ?research shows that it?s in our power to fashion it for ourselves.?"

"Bring gratitude to mind. Write down three new things you are grateful for each day . . . Research shows this will significantly improve your optimism even six months later, and raises your success rates significantly."

"Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals."

"Despite the decades of research that tell us otherwise, many businesses and their leaders still cling stubbornly to their belief in this flawed order. The ruling powers continue to tell us that if we just put our nose to the grindstone and work hard now, we will be successful, and therefore happier, in some distant future."

"Common sense is not common action? That?s why even though doctors know better than anyone the importance of exercise and diet, 44 percent of them are overweight."

"Companies and leaders who take measures to cultivate a happy workplace will not only have more productive and efficient workers. They?ll have less absenteeism and lower healthcare expenditures."

"Each one of us is like that butterfly (re: the butterfly effect). And each tiny move towards a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations, our families, and our communities."

"Emotions are highly contagious? both negative emotions and positive emotions."

"Each one of us is like that butterfly the Butterfly Effect. And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations our families and our communities."

"Every Monday, ask yourself these three questions: (1) Do I believe that the intelligence and skills of my employees are not fixed, but can be improved with effort?; (2) Do I believe that my employees want to make that effort, just as they want to find meaning and fulfillment in their jobs?; and (3) How am I conveying these beliefs in my daily words and actions?"

"Even the smallest shots of positivity can give someone a serious competitive edge."

"Exercise for 15 minutes a day. This trains your brain to believe your behavior matters, which causes a cascade of success throughout the rest of the day."

"Feeling that we are in control, that we are masters of our own fate at work and at home, is one of the strongest drivers of both well-being and performance."

"Every time employees experience a small burst of happiness, they get primed for creativity and innovation. They see solutions they might otherwise have missed."

"Extensive research has found that happiness actually has a very important evolutionary purpose, something Barbara Fredrickson has termed the ?Broaden and Build Theory.? Instead of narrowing our actions down to fight or flight as negative emotions do, positive ones broaden the amount of possibilities we process, making us more thoughtful, creative, and open to new ideas."

"Everyone has one or two quick activities they know will make them smile, and however trivial they may feel, their benefits are worth it."

"Fifty years ago, the mean onset age of depression was 29.5 years old. Today, it is almost exactly half that: 14.5 years old."

"Focusing on the good isn?t just about overcoming our inner grump to see the glass half full. It?s about opening our minds to the ideas and opportunities that will help us be more productive, effective, and successful at work and in life."

"First, every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better school, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we?re going to change your sales target. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we?ve done is we?ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society. And that?s because we think we have to be successful, then we?ll be happier."

"Focus on the Positive. Write for two minutes a day describing one positive experience you had over the past 24 hours. This is a strategy to help transform you from a task-based thinker, to a meaning based thinker who scans the world for meaning instead of endless to-dos. This dramatically increases work happiness."

"For me, happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential. The chief engine of happiness is positive emotions, since happiness is, above all else, a feeling. This reveals something important about the Happiness Advantage in action: Even the smallest shots of positivity can give someone a serious competitive edge."

"For me, happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential."

"Happiness and optimism can be much better predictors of productivity than IQ and technical skills."

"Habits are like financial capital ? forming one today is an investment that will automatically give out returns for years to come."

"Happiness can improve our physical health, which in turn keeps us working faster and longer and therefore makes us more likely to succeed."

"Happiness is a choice and a practice."

"Happiness is not about lying to ourselves, or turning a blind eye to the negative, but about adjusting our brain so that we see the ways to rise above our circumstances."

"Happiness is not the belief that we don?t need to change; it is the realization that we can."

"Happiness and health have less to do with how much control we actually have and more with how much control we think we have."

"If all you strive for is diminishing the bad, you?ll only attain the average and you?ll miss out entirely on the opportunity to exceed the average."

"I think it?s impossible for us to sustain happiness without meaning. And as soon as we start to try to define happiness in our life without having meaning, all we?re talking about is pleasure. And pleasure is short-term... If happiness is just pleasure, it becomes a trap... So if I?m not feeling pleasure right now, well, then I must not be happy. Then I?m not going to keep trying, because this is too difficult now. What I?m interested in is how do we redefine happiness to be ? I stole this definition from the ancient Greeks ? the joy that we feel striving for our potential... Because if happiness is just pleasure, we have to keep running after it very quickly, and we know it?s not going to last. But if happiness is joy, joy is something we can feel in the ups and downs of life. It?s something we can experience even when things are not pleasurable, when you?re working on a very difficult project, when you?re going for a difficult run... even childbirth is not a pleasurable experience all the time, but you can actually seek out that joy... The thing I love about joy that we experience striving towards our potential is that potential could be anything. It could be as an entrepreneur, as a business leader. It could be as a lover, as a son, as a daughter, as a human being. And the more that we actually strive towards that potential, that?s where people experience greater levels of happiness, and it allows us to stop making that disjunct between happiness and success."

"Happiness is relative to the person experiencing it. This is why scientists often refer to it as ?subjective well-being? because it?s based on how we each feel about our own lives."

"If I know everyone?s IQ here in the room and I?m trying to predict your job successes, cross-industry, over the next five-year period, it turns out that IQ and technical skills are only responsible [for] and only predict 25 % of your job successes."

"Happiness is the joy we feel striving toward our potential."

"I think most people think that their genes are their environment, that that person is happy because they were born happy... The reason why we keep finding genes to be so important is that the average person doesn?t fight their genes... What I find that positive geniuses are able to do is to realize that they can actually be co-creators of the lens with which they view the world with their environment and their genes, so much so we can get people with genes for pessimism to act in the world and to become high-level optimists. We actually haven?t found anyone who is not capable of changing if they?re willing to be able to make some of these positive changes within their life, which shows us that if we just push against our environment and our genes and create some of these positive habits... [we] can actually get people to change their genetic set point and create a whole new trajectory."

"If I work harder, I?ll be more successful. And if I?m more successful, then I?ll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior."

"If we study merely what is average, we will remain merely average."

"If you can raise somebody?s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, what we?ve found is that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You?re 37 percent better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we?re able to work harder, faster and more intelligently. What we need to be able to do is to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you?re positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way."

"Instead of creating a cognitive pattern that looks for negatives and blocks success, it trains our brains to scan the world for the opportunities and ideas that allow our success rate to grow."

"In one incredible study, researchers found that when they gave a group of nursing home residents more control over simple tasks in their daily lives?like putting them in charge of their own house plants?not only did their levels of happiness improve, but their mortality rate actually dropped in half."

"Infuse positivity into your surroundings."

"If you raise your levels of happiness, it turns out every single business and educational outcome improves. Our success rates rise dramatically. Raising success does not raise levels of happiness but raising levels of happiness dramatically increases your success rates."

"It doesn?t matter if the glass is half-empty or half-full if there is a pitcher nearby to refill it."

"It turns out that our brains are literally hardwired to perform at their best not when they are negative or even neutral, but when they are positive."

"If you take four-year-old children, prime them to become more positive and have them put blocks of shapes together, it turns out the children in the positive category will put blocks together significantly faster than children in a negative/neutral category."

"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. It?s not falling down, it?s falling up."

"In 200 studies on 275,000 people worldwide. Their findings exactly matched the principles I was teaching?that happiness leads to success in nearly every domain, including work, health, friendship, sociability, creativity, and energy."