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.
Success does not mean happiness. Check out any celebrity magazine to look for examples to disabuse you of thinking that being beautiful, successful or rich will make you happy.
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.
The absence of disease is not health.
When a manager openly expresses his faith in an employee’s skill, he doesn’t just improve mood and motivation; he actually improves their likelihood of succeeding.
Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it’s the realization that we can.
Research shows you get multiple tasks done faster if you do them one at a time. It also decreases stress and raises happiness.
Scientifically, happiness is a choice. It is a choice about where your single processor brain will devote its finite resources as you process the world.
Happiness is the precursor to success.
You spend money on Internet connection for your employees. Why not spend money on the energy that fuels their brains?
You can study gravity forever without learning how to fly.
The fastest way to disengage an employee is to tell him his work is meaningful only because of the paycheck.
Study after study shows that happiness precedes important outcomes and indicators of thriving.
Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time.
Happiness inspires productivity.
It’s hard to find happiness after success if the goalposts of success keep changing.
Most people keep waiting on happiness, putting off happiness until they’re successful or until they achieve some goal, which means we limit both happiness and success. That formula doesn’t work.
As we got more interested in time management and productivity, we lost the individual, and with that individual loss, we lost happiness as well. So I think the world has actually been malnourished as we’ve focused so much on productivity and ignored happiness and meaning to our own detriment.
By changing our mindset and habits, we can actually dramatically change the course of life, improve intelligence, productivity, improve the quality of our lives, and improve every single education and business outcome.
Happiness is actually an individual choice, even in the midst of negative circumstances. It’s not something our employers can give to us, though they can limit and influence that choice.
The greatest competitive advantage in our modern economy is a positive and engaged brain.