By Shawn Achor. 2010.
Part Two: Seven Principles
Once I’d finished gathering and analyzing this massive amount of research, I was able to isolate seven specific, actionable, and proven patterns that predict success and achievement.
The Happiness Advantage —Because positive brains have a biological advantage over brains that are neutral or negative, this principle teaches us how to retrain our brains to capitalize on positivity and improve our productivity and performance.
The Fulcrum and the Lever —How we experience the world, and our ability to succeed within it, constantly changes based on our mindset. This principle teaches us how we can adjust our mindset (our fulcrum) in a way that gives us the power (the lever) to be more fulfilled and successful.
The Tetris Effect —When our brains get stuck in a pattern that focuses on stress, negativity, and failure, we set ourselves up to fail. This principle teaches us how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see—and seize—opportunity wherever we look.
Falling Up —In the midst of defeat, stress, and crisis, our brains map different paths to help us cope. This principle is about finding the mental path that not only leads us up out of failure or suffering, but teaches us to be happier and more successful because of it.
The Zorro Circle —When challenges loom and we get overwhelmed, our rational brains can get hijacked by emotions. This principle teaches us how to regain control by focusing first on small, manageable goals, and then gradually expanding our circle to achieve bigger and bigger ones.
The 20-Second Rule —Sustaining lasting change often feels impossible because our willpower is limited. And when willpower fails, we fall back on our old habits and succumb to the path of least resistance. This principle shows how, by making small energy adjustments, we can reroute the path of least resistance and replace bad habits with good ones.
Social Investment —In the midst of challenges and stress, some people choose to hunker down and retreat within themselves. But the most successful people invest in their friends, peers, and family members to propel themselves forward. This principle teaches us how to invest more in one of the greatest predictors of success and excellence—our social support network.
Principle #1: The Happiness Advantage
So how do scientists define happiness? Essentially, as the experience of positive emotions–pleasure combined with deeper feelings of meaning and purpose. Happiness implies a positive mood in the present and a positive outlook for the future. Martin Seligman, the pioneer in positive psychology, has broken it down into three, measurable components: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. His studies have confirmed (though most of us know this intuitively) that people who pursue only pleasure experience only part of the benefits happiness can bring, while those who pursue all three routes lead the fullest lives. Perhaps the most accurate term for happiness, then, is the one Aristotle used: eudaemonia, which translates not directly to “happiness” but to “human flourishing.”
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.”
…here are a number of proven ways we can improve our moods and raise our levels of happiness throughout the day:
Meditate. Neuroscientists have found that monks who spend years meditating actually grow their left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most responsible foe feeling happy.
Find Something to Look Forward To. Anticipating future rewards can actually light up the pleasure centers in your brain as much as the actual reward itself.
Commit Conscious Acts of Kindness. A long line of empirical evidence, including one study of over 2,000 people, has shown that acts of altruism–giving to friends and strangers alike–decrease stress and strongly contribute to enhanced mental health. Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leading researcher and author of The How of Happiness, has found that individuals told to complete five acts of kindness over the course of a day report feeling much happier than control groups and that the feeling last for many subsequent days, far after the exercise is over. To try this yourself, pick one day a week and make a point of committing five acts of kindness. But if you want to reap the psychological benefits, make sure you do these things deliberately and consciously–you can’t just look back over the last 24 hours and declare your acts post hoc.
Infuse Positivity Into Your Surroundings. …our physical environment can have an enormous impact on our mindset and sense of well-being. … Making time to go outside on a nice day also delivers a huge advantage; one study found that spending 20 minutes outside in good weather not only boosted positive mood, but broadened thinking and improved working memory. … studies have shown that the less negative TV we watch, specifically violent media, the happier we are.
Exercise. You have probably heard that exercise releases pleasure-inducing chemicals called endorphins, but that’s not its only benefit. Physical activity can boost mood and enhance our work performance in a number of other ways as well, by improving motivation and feelings of mastery, reducing stress and anxiety, and helping us get into flow—that “locked in” feeling of total engagement that we usually get when we’re at our most productive.
Spend Money (but Not on Stuff). Contrary to the popular saying, money can buy happiness, but only if used to do things as opposed to simply have things. In his book Luxury Fever, Robert Frank explains that while the positive feelings we get from material objects are frustratingly fleeting, spending money on experiences, especially ones with other people, produces positive emotions that are both more meaningful and more lasting. For instance, when researchers interviewed more than 150 people about their recent purchases, they found that money spent on activities—such as concerts and group dinners out—brought far more pleasure than material purchases like shoes, televisions, or expensive watches. Spending money on other people, called “prosocial spending,” also boosts happiness.
Exercise a Signature Strength. Everyone is good at something–perhaps you give excellent advice, or you’re great with little kids, or you whip up a mean batch of blueberry pancakes. Each time we use a skill, whatever it is, we experience a burst of positivity. If you find yourself in need of a happiness booster, revisit a talent you haven’t used in a while.
Even more fulfilling than using a skill, though, is exercising a strength of character, a trait that is deeply embedded in who we are. A team of psychologists recently cataloged the 24 cross-cultural character strengths that most contribute to human flourishing. They then developed a comprehensive survey that identifies an individual’s top five, or “signature” strengths. (To learn what’s in your own top five, go to www.viasurvey.org and take the survey for free.) When 577 volunteers were encouraged to pick one of their signature strengths and use it in a new way each day for a week, they became significantly happier and less depressed than control groups. And these benefits lasted: Even after the experiment was over, their levels of happiness remained heightened a full six months later.
Principle #2: The Fulcrum and The Lever
Because out brain’s resources are limited, we are left with a choice: to use those finite resources to see only pain, negativity, stress, and uncertainty, or to use those resources to look at things through a lens of gratitude, hope, resilience, optimism, and meaning. In other words, while we of course can’t change reality through sheer force of will alone, we can use out brain to change how we process the world, and that in turn changes how we react to it.
More important still than believing in your own abilities is believing that you can improve these abilities. Few people have proven this theory more convincingly than Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, whose studies show that whether or not someone believes their intelligence is changeable directly affects their achievement. Dweck found that people can be split into two categories: Those with a “fixed mindset” believe that their capabilities are already set, while those with a “growth mindset” believe that they can enhance their basic qualities through effort. A growth mindset is not dismissive of innate ability; it merely recognizes, as Dweck explains, that “although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience.” Her research has shown that people with fixed mindsets miss choice opportunities for improvement and consistently underperform, while those with a “growth mindset” watch their abilities move ever upward.
Principle #3: The Tetris Effect
This [Basketball-Passing and Gorilla] experiment highlights called “inattentional blindness,” our frequent inability to see what is often right in front of us if we’re not focused directly on it. This aspect of human biology means that we can miss an astoundingly large number of things that might be considered “obvious.” … In essence, we tend to miss what we’re not looking for.
This selective perception is also why when we are looking for something, we see it everywhere.
Repeated studies have shown that two people can view the same situation and actually see different things, depending on what they are expecting to see. It’s not just that they come away with different interpretations of the same event, but that they have actually seen different things in their visual field.
While there are always different ways to see something, not all ways of seeing are created equal.
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. The role happiness plays should be obvious–the more you pick up on the positive around you, the better you’ll feel–and we’ve already seen the advantages to performance that brings. The second mechanism at work here is gratitude, because the more opportunities for positivity we see, the more grateful we become. Psychologist Robert Emmons, who has spent nearly his entire career studying gratitude, has found that few things in life are as integral to our well-being. Countless other studies have shown that consistently grateful people are more energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely. And it’s not that people are only grateful because they are happier, either; gratitude has proven to be a significant cause of positive emotions. When researchers pick random volunteers and train them to be more grateful over a period of a few weeks, they become happier and more optimistic, feel more socially connected, enjoy better quality sleep, and even experience fewer headaches than control groups.
The third driver of the Tetris Effect is optimism. This instinctively makes sense; the more your brain picks up on the positive, the more you’ll expect this trend to continue, and so the more optimistic you’ll be. And optimism, it turns out, is a tremendously powerful predictor of work performance. Studies have shown that 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-bring during times of hardship–all skills that are crucial to high performance in a demanding work environment.
…expecting positive outcomes actually makes them more likely to arise.
The people who had claimed to be unlucky in life again looked right past this opportunity. Stuck in a Negative Tetris Effect, they were incapable of seeing what was so clear to others, and their performance (and wallets) suffered because of it. The extraordinary thing about Wiseman’s study is that the same possibility for huge reward was latent in everyone’s environment—it was just a matter of whether or not they picked up on it.
The difference between people who capitalize on these chances and those who who watch them pass by (or miss them entirely) is all a matter of focus. When someone is stuck in a Negative Tetris Effect, his brain is quite literally incapable of seeing these opportunities. But armed with positivity, the brain stays open to possibility. Psychologists call this “predictive encoding”: Priming yourself to expect a favorable outcome actually encodes your brain to recognize the outcome when it does in fact arise.
Just as it takes days of concentrated practice to master a video game, training your brain to notice more opportunities takes practice focusing on the positive. The best way to kick-start this is to start making a daily list of the good things in your job, your career, and your life. It may sound hokey, or ridiculously simple—and indeed the activity itself is simple—but over a decade of empirical studies has proven the profound effect it has on the way our brains are wired.
When you write down a list of “three good things” that happened that day, your brain will be forced to scan the last 24 hours for potential positives–things that brought small or large laughs, feelings of accomplishment at work, a strengthened connection with family, a glimmer of hope for the future. In just five minutes a day, 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. At the same time, because we can only focus on so much at once, our brains push out those small annoyances and frustrations that used to loom large into the background, even out of our visual field entirely.
This exercise has staying power. One study found that participants who wrote down three good things each day for a week were happier and less depressed at the one-month, three-month, and six-month follow-ups. More amazing: Even after stopping the exercise, they remained significantly happier and showed higher levels of optimism. The better they got at scanning the world for good things to write down, the more good things they saw, without even trying, wherever they looked. The items you write down each day don’t need to be profound or complicated, only specific.
A variation on the Three Good Things exercise is to write a short journal entry about a positive experience. We have long known that venting about hardships and suffering can provide welcome relief, but researchers Chad Burton and Laura King have found that journaling about positive experiences has at least an equally powerful effect. In one experiment, they instructed people to write about a positive experience for 20 minutes three times a week and then compared them to a control group who wrote about neutral topics. Not only did the first group experience larger spikes in happiness, but three months later they even had fewer symptoms of illness.
As with any skill, the more we practice, the more easily and naturally it comes. Since the best way to ensure follow-through on a desired activity is to make it a habit…the key here is to ritualize the task. For example, pick the same time each day to write down your gratitude list, and keep the necessary items easily accessible and convenient. (A small steno pad and pen sit on my bedside table, specifically for this purpose.) When I worked with employees at American Express, I encouraged them to set a Microsoft Outlook alert for 11 A.M. every day to remind themselves to write down their three good things. … It doesn’t matter when you do it, as long as you do it on a regular basis.
The human brain is constantly creating and revising mental maps to help us navigate our way through this complex and ever-changing world—kind of like a tireless, overeager cartographer. This tendency has been wired in us through thousands of years of evolution: In order to survive, we must create physical maps of our environment, map out strategies for getting food and sex, and map out the possible effects of our actions.
Study after study shows that 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, author of Good to Great, reminds us that “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.” By scanning our mental map for positive opportunities, and by rejecting the belief that every down in life leads us only further downward, we give ourselves the greatest power possible: the ability to move up not despite the setbacks, but because of them.
Bereavement, bone marrow transplantation, breast cancer, chronic illness, heart attack, military combat, natural disaster, physical assault, refugee displacement. If this reads like a random clip from an alphabetized nightmare list of the very worst things that can befall us, that’s because it basically is. But it also happens to be a list of events that researchers have found to spur profound positive growth in many, many individuals. Psychologists have termed this experience Adversarial Growth, or Post-Traumatic Growth, to distinguish it from the better-known term Post-Traumatic Stress.
Over the last two decades, psychologist Richard Tedeschi and his colleagues have made the empirical study of Post-Traumatic Growth their mission. While Tedeschi admits that the idea itself is ancient—surely you’ve heard the maxim “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger”—he explains that “it has only been in the last 25 years or so that this phenomenon, the possibility of something good emerging from the struggle with something very difficult, has been the focus of systematic theorizing and empirical investigation.” Thanks to this study, today we can say for certain, not just anecdotally, that great suffering or trauma can actually lead to great positive change across a wide range of experiences.
What kind of positive growth? Increases in spirituality, compassion for others, openness, and even, eventually, overall life satisfaction. After trauma, people also report enhanced personal strength and self-confidence, as well as a heightened appreciation for, and a greater intimacy in, their social relationships.
Of course, this isn’t true for everybody. So what distinguishes the people who find growth in these experiences from those who don’t? There are a number of mechanisms involved, but not surprisingly, mindset takes center stage. People’s ability to find the path up rests largely on how they conceive of the cards they have been dealt, so the strategies that most often lead to Adversarial Growth include 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). As one set of researchers explains, “it appears that it is not the type of event per se that influences post-traumatic growth, but rather the subjective experience of the event.” In other words, the people who can most successfully get themselves up off the mat are those who define themselves not by what has happened to them, but by what they can make out of what has happened. These are the people who actually use adversity to find the path forward. They speak not just of “bouncing back,” but of “bouncing forward.”
While many of us, thankfully, live lives free of serious trauma, we all experience adversity of one kind or another at some point in our lives. Mistakes. Obstacles. Failure. Disappointment. Suffering. We have many words to describe the degrees of hardship that can befall us at any given moment in our personal or professional lives. And yet with every setback comes some opportunity for growth that we can teach ourselves to see and take advantage of. As my mentor Tal Ben-Shahar likes to say, “things do not necessarily happen for the best, but some people are able to make the best out of things that happen.”
The most successful people see adversity not as a stumbling block, but as a stepping-stone to greatness. Indeed, early failure is often the fuel for the very ideas that eventually transform industries, make record profits, and reinvent careers.
Unfortunately, the path from failure to success is not always easy to spot. In the midst of crisis, we can get so stuck in the misery of the status quo that we forget another path is available.
After decades of studying human behavior, Seligman and his colleagues found that the same patterns of helplessness that he saw in those dogs are incredibly common in humans. When we fail, or when life delivers us a shock, we can become so hopeless that we respond by simply giving up. The fact is that in our modern, often overstressed business world, cubicles are the new shuttleboxes, and workers the new dogs.
But the problem is, when we eliminate any upward options from our mental maps, and worse, eliminate our motivation to search for them, we end up undermining our ability to tackle the challenge at hand. And it doesn’t end there. When people feel helpless in one area of life, they not only give up in that one area; they often “overlearn” the lesson and apply it to other situations. They become convinced that one dead-end path must be proof that all possible paths are dead ends. A setback at work might lead to despondency about one’s relationship, or a rift with a friend might discourage us from trying to form bonds with our colleagues, and so on. When this happens, our helplessness spirals out of control, impeding our success in all areas of life. It’s the very definition of pessimism and depression—an event map with all dead ends—and a surefire route to failure. We don’t have to stretch far to see this negative cycle on a larger social scale–learned helplessness is endemic in inner city schools, prisons, and elsewhere. When people don’t believe there is a way up, they have virtually no choice but to stay as down as they are.
Fortunately, just as personal crises can provide the foundation for positive individual growth, so can economic ones. They often propel companies to greater success, and many business juggernauts of the twentieth century—Hewlett-Packard and Texas Instruments among them—were actually launched during the Great Depression. Similarly, America’s top companies have often used recessions to reevaluate and improve their business practices.
Decades of subsequent study have since shown that explanatory style—how we choose to explain the nature of past events—has a crucial impact on our happiness and future success. People with an optimistic explanatory style interpret adversity as being local and temporary (i.e., “It’s not that bad, and it will get better.”) while those with a pessimistic explanatory style see these events as more global and permanent (i.e., “It’s really bad, and it’s never going to change.”). Their beliefs then directly affect their actions; the ones who believe the latter statement sink into helplessness and stop trying, while the ones who believe the former are spurred on to higher performance.
Virtually all avenues of success, we now know, are dictated by explanatory style. It predicts how well students do in high school, and even how well new recruits do at the U.S. Military Academy: First-year plebes with a more optimistic explanatory style perform better than test scores predict, and are less likely to drop out than their peers.
Of course, turning adversity into opportunity is a skill that comes more naturally to some people than others. Some people already have an optimistic explanatory style. They automatically imagine alternative scenarios that make them feel fortunate, interpret setbacks as short-lived and small in scope, and see inherent opportunity where others only see foreboding. Others don’t have an optimistic explanatory style. Luckily, these techniques can be learned.
One way to help ourselves see the path from adversity to opportunity is to practice the ABCD model of interpretation: Adversity, Belief, Consequence, and Disputation. Adversity is the event we can’t change; it is what it is. Belief is our reaction to the event; why we thought it happened and what we think it means for the future. Is it a problem that is only temporary and local in nature or do we think it is permanent and pervasive? Are there ready solutions, or do we think it is unsolvable? If we believe the former—that is, if we see the adversity as short-term or as an opportunity for growth or appropriately confined to only part of our life—then we maximize the chance of a positive Consequence. But if the Belief has led us down a more pessimistic path, helplessness and inaction can bring negative Consequences. That’s when it’s time to put the D to work.
Disputation involves first telling ourselves that our belief is just that—a belief, not fact—and then challenging (or disputing) it. Psychologists recommend that we externalize this voice (i.e., pretend it’s coming from someone else), so it’s like we’re actually arguing with another person. What is the evidence for this belief? Is it airtight? Would we let a friend get away with such reasoning? Or is the reasoning clearly specious once we step outside of ourselves and take a look? What are some other plausible interpretations of this event? What are some more adaptive reactions to it? Is there another counterfactual we can adopt instead?
And finally, if the adversity truly is bad, is it as bad as we first thought? This particular method is called decatastrophizing: taking time to show ourselves that while the adversity is real, it is perhaps not as catastrophic as we may have made it out to be. That may sound like a positive platitude stripped off of a Hallmark card, but the idea that things are never as bad as they seem is actually a fact based on our fundamental biology. Because thousands of years of evolution have made us so remarkably good at adapting to even the most extreme life circumstances, adversity never hits us quite as hard—or for quite as long—as we think it might.
For example, we might assume that a horrible injury would forever alter our ability to be happy, but in fact, after an initial adjustment and period of hardship, most victims of paralysis bounce back to just about the same level of happiness they experienced before. Simply speaking, the human psyche is so much more resilient than we even realize. Which is why, when faced with a terrible prospect—for example, the end of a love affair or of a job—we overestimate how unhappy it will make us and for how long. We fall victim to “immune neglect,” which means we consistently forget how good our psychological immune system is at helping us get over adversity.
Daniel Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, has performed a number of studies showing immune neglect in action. College students overestimate how devastated they would feel at the end of a romantic relationship. Assistant professors predict that being denied tenure would lead to drastically lowered levels of happiness, when in fact professors denied tenure do not experience this at all. Adversities, no matter what they are, simply don’t hit us as hard as we think they will. Just knowing this quirk of human psychology—that our fear of consequences is always worse than the consequences themselves—can help us move toward a more optimistic interpretation of the downs we will inevitably face.
So the next time you catch yourself feeling hopeless—or helpless—about some snag in your career, some frustration at your job, or some disappointment in your personal life, remember that there is always a Third Path upwards—your only task is to find it.
Principle #5: The Zorro Circle
The concept of the Zorro Circle is a powerful metaphor for how we can achieve our most ambitious goals in our jobs, our careers, and our personal lives. 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 first 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. Don Diego didn’t teach young Alejandro how to be a swashbuckling swordsman overnight. Zorro started small, then little by little mastered his ever-widening circle. His legendary success followed from there.
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. Among students, greater feelings of control lead not only to higher levels of happiness, but also to higher grades and more motivation to pursue the careers they really want. Similarly, employees who feel they have high levels of control at the office are better at their jobs and report more job satisfaction. These benefits then ripple outward. A 2002 study of nearly 3,000 wage and salaried employees for the National Study of the Changing Workforce found that greater feelings of control at work predicted greater satisfaction in nearly every aspect of life: family, job, relationships, and so on. People who felt in control at work also had lower levels of stress, work-family conflict, and job turnover.
…if we believe nothing we do matters, we fall prey to the insidious grip of learned helplessness… On the other hand, someone with an internal locus will look for what he or she might have done better, and then work to improve in that area.
Believing that, for the most part, our actions determine our fates in life can only spur us to work harder; and when we see this hard work pay off, our belief in ourselves only grows stronger. This is true in nearly every domain of life. Research has shown that people who believe that the power lies within their circle have higher academic achievement, greater career achievement, and are much happier at work. An internal locus lowers job stress and turnover, and leads to higher motivation, organizational commitment, and task performance. “Internals,” as they are sometimes called, have even stronger relationships—which makes sense given that studies show how much better they are at communicating, problem-solving, and working to achieve mutual goals. They are also more attentive listeners and more adept at social interactions—all qualities, incidentally, that predict success at work as well as at home.
Because feeling in control over our jobs and our lives reduces stress, it even affects our physical health. One sweeping study of 7,400 employees found that those who felt they had little control over deadlines imposed by other people had a 50 percent higher risk of coronary heart disease than their counterparts. In fact, this effect was so staggering, researchers concluded that feeling a lack of control over pressure at work is as great a risk factor for heart disease as even high blood pressure.
Unfortunately, given how important it is to our success, we don’t always feel in control. Some of us are inherently prone to an external locus, and the rest of us can fall into that mindset the second we feel overwhelmed by too many demands on our time, attention, and abilities.
Once you’ve mastered the self-awareness circle, your next goal should be to identify which aspects of the situation you have control over and which you don’t. When I worked with the Shanghai manager and his colleagues I mentioned in the last chapter, I asked them to write out all their stresses, daily challenges, and goals, then to separate them into two categories: things that they have control over and things they don’t. Anyone can do this simple exercise on a piece of paper, an Excel spreadsheet, or even on a napkin over post-work martinis. The point is to tease apart the stresses that we have to let go of because they’re out of our hands, while at the same time identifying the areas where our efforts will have a real impact, so that we can then focus our energy accordingly.
Once my trainees are armed with a list of what is indeed still within their control, I have them identify one small goal they know they can quickly accomplish. By narrowing their scope of action, and focusing their energy and efforts, the likelihood of success increases.
Think of it this way: The best way to wash a car is to put a thumb over the hose’s spout, so that only a fraction of the area is open. Why? Because this concentrates the water pressure, making the hose much more powerful. At work, the equivalent of this is concentrating your efforts on small areas where you know you can make a difference. By tackling one small challenge at a time—a narrow circle that slowly expands outward—we can relearn that our actions do have a direct effect on our outcomes, that we are largely the masters of our own fates. With an increasingly internal locus of control and a greater confidence in our abilities, we can then expand our efforts outward.
Principle #6: The 20-Second Rule
Common sense is not common action.
Without action, knowledge is often meaningless. As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently. Yet the action required to follow through on what we know is often the hardest part.
While his brother Henry was gaining worldwide fame as a novelist, William James was carving out his own niche in history with his breakthroughs in the field of psychology. Born a few years into the second half of the nineteenth century, James applied his training in medicine, philosophy, and psychology to his lifelong study of the human mind. He taught Harvard’s first experimental psychology class in 1875 and by 1890 had published Principles of Psychology, a 1,200-page tour de force that became the precursor to the modern psychology textbook.
In my mind though, the greatest contribution William James made to the field of psychology is one that was a full century ahead of his time. Humans, James said, are biologically prone to habit, and it is because we are “mere bundles of habits” that we are able to automatically perform many of our daily tasks…
It is precisely because habits are so automatic that we rarely stop and think about the enormous role they play in shaping our behavior, and in fact, our lives. After all, if we had to make a conscious choice about every little thing we did all day, we would likely be overwhelmed by breakfast.
None of this seems particularly groundbreaking to us today. But what William James concluded was indeed crucial to our understanding of behavioral change. Given our natural tendency to act out of habit, James surmised, couldn’t the key to sustaining positive change be to turn each desired action into a habit, so that it would come automatically, without much effort, thought, or choice?
Of course, this is where the phrase “easier said than done” has particular relevance. Good habits may be the answer, but how do we create them in the first place? William James had a prescription for that, too. He called it “daily strokes of effort.” This is hardly revelatory, basically a reworking of the old dictum “practice makes perfect.” Still, he was on to something far more sophisticated than he could possibly have known at the time. “A tendency to act,” he wrote, “only becomes effectively ingrained in us in proportion to the uninterrupted frequency with which the actions actually occur, and the brain ‘grows’ to their use.” In other words, habits form because our brain actually changes in response to frequent practice.
In fact, James had this exactly right, though it would take a hundred years before neuroscientists could explain why. Remember how we learned that the brain’s structures and pathways are flexible and elastic? Well, it turns out that as we progress through our days learning new facts, completing new tasks, and having new conversations, our brains are constantly changing and rewiring to reflect these experiences. With apologies to the delicate nuances of neuroscience, here is what is happening in a nutshell: Within our brains are billions upon billions of neurons, interconnected in every which way to form a complex set of neural pathways. Electrical currents travel down these pathways, from neuron to neuron, delivering the messages that make up our every thought and action. The more we perform a particular action, the more connections form between the corresponding neurons. (This is the origin of the common phrase “cells that fire together, wire together.”) The stronger this link, the faster the message can travel down the pathway. This is what makes the behavior seem second nature or automatic.
This is also how we become skilled at an activity with practice. For instance, the first time you try to juggle, the neural pathways involved are unused, and so the message travels slowly. The more time you spend juggling, the more these pathways get reinforced, so that on the eighth day of practice, the electrical currents are firing at a much more rapid pace. This is when you’ll notice that juggling comes easier, requires less concentration, and that you can do it faster. Eventually, you can be listening to music, chewing gum, and having a conversation with someone else, all while those three oranges are flying through the air. Juggling has become automatic, a habit, cemented in your brain by a solid new network of neural pathways.
In general, Americans actually find free time more difficult to enjoy than work. If that sounds ridiculous, consider this: For the most part, our jobs require us to use our skills, engage our minds, and pursue our goals–all things that have been shown to contribute to happiness. If that sounds ridiculous, consider this: For the most part, our jobs require us to use our skills, engage our minds, and pursue our goals—all things that have been shown to contribute to happiness. Of course, leisure activities can do this too, but because they’re not required of us—because there is no “leisure boss” leaning over our shoulder on Sunday mornings telling us we’d better be at the art museum by 9 A.M. sharp—we often find it difficult to muster the energy necessary to kick-start them. So we follow the path of least resistance, and that path inevitably leads us to the couch and the television. And because we are “mere bundles of habit,” the more often we succumb to this path, the more difficult it becomes to change directions.
Unfortunately, though these types of “passive leisure,” like watching TV and trolling around on Facebook, might be easier and more convenient than biking or looking at art or playing soccer, they don’t offer the same rewards. Studies show that these activities are enjoyable and engaging for only about 30 minutes, then they start sapping our energy, creating what psychologists call “psychic entropy”—that listless, apathetic feeling Cathy experienced.
On the other hand, “active leisure” like hobbies, games, and sports enhance our concentration, engagement, motivation, and sense of enjoyment. Studies have found that American teenagers are two and half times more likely to experience elevated enjoyment when engaged in a hobby than when watching TV, and three times more likely when playing a sport. And yet here’s the paradox: These same teenagers spend four times as many hours watching TV as they do engaging in sports or hobbies. So what gives? Or, as psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi put it more eloquently, “Why would we spend four times more time doing something that has less than half the chance of making us feel good?”
The answer is that we are drawn—powerfully, magnetically—to those things that are easy, convenient, and habitual, and it is incredibly difficult to overcome this inertia. Active leisure is more enjoyable, but it almost always requires more initial effort—getting the bike out of the garage, driving to the museum, tuning the guitar, and so on. Csikszentmihalyi calls this “activation energy.” In physics, activation energy is the initial spark needed to catalyze a reaction. The same energy, both physical and mental, is needed of people to overcome inertia and kick-start a positive habit. Otherwise, human nature takes us down the path of least resistance time and time again.
What I had done here, essentially, was put the desired behavior on the path of least resistance, so it actually took less energy and effort to pick up and practice the guitar than to avoid it. I like to refer to this as the 20-Second Rule, because lowering the barrier to change by just 20 seconds was all it took to help me form a new life habit.
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.
The 20-Second Rule isn’t just about altering the time it takes to do things. Limiting the choices we have to make can also help lower the barrier to positive change. You may recall how Roy Baumeister’s willpower studies showed that self-control is a limited resource that gets weakened with overuse. Well, these same researchers have discovered that too much choice similarly saps our reserves.
Their studies showed that with every additional choice people are asked to make, their physical stamina, ability to perform numerical calculations, persistence in the face of failure, and overall focus drop dramatically. And these don’t have to be difficult decisions either—the questions are more “chocolate or vanilla?” than they are Sophie’s Choice. Yet every one of these innocuous choices depletes our energy a little further, until we just don’t have enough to continue with the positive habit we’re trying to adopt.
Something weird happens in the human brain when you put your athletic shoes on—you start to think it is easier to just go work out now than to “take all this stuff back off again.” In reality, it’s easier to take off the shoes, but your brain, once it has tipped toward a habit, will naturally keep rolling in that direction, following the path of perceived least resistance.
Principle #7: Social Investment
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. 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? Valliant 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’s findings have been duplicated time and again. In their book Happiness, psychologists Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener review the massive amount of cross-cultural research that has been conducted on happiness over the last few decades, and they conclude that, “like food and air, we seem to need social relationships to thrive.” That’s because when we have a community of people we can count on—spouse, family, friends, colleagues—we multiply our emotional, intellectual, and physical resources. We bounce back from setbacks faster, accomplish more, and feel a greater sense of purpose. Furthermore, the effect on our happiness, and therefore on our ability to profit from the Happiness Advantage, is both immediate and long-lasting. First, social interactions jolt us with positivity in the moment; then, each of these single connections strengthens a relationship over time, which raises our happiness baseline permanently. So when a colleague stops you in the hallway at work to say hello and ask about your day, the brief interaction actually sparks a continual upward spiral of happiness and its inherent rewards.
Positive outliers already know this to be true—indeed, it’s what makes them positive outliers. In a study appropriately titled “Very Happy People,” researchers sought out the characteristics of the happiest 10 percent among us. Do they all live in warm climates? Are they all wealthy? Are they all physically fit? Turns out, there was one—and only one—characteristic that distinguished the happiest 10 percent from everybody else: the strength of their social relationships. My empirical study of well-being among 1,600 Harvard undergraduates found a similar result—social support was a far greater predictor of happiness than any other factor, more than GPA, family income, SAT scores, age, gender, or race. In fact, the correlation between social support and happiness was 0.7. This may not sound like a big number, but for researchers it’s huge—most psychology findings are considered significant when they hit 0.3. The point is, the more social support you have, the happier you are. And as we know, the happier you are, the more advantages you accrue in nearly every domain of life.
Our need for social support isn’t just in our heads. Evolutionary psychologists explain that the innate need to affiliate and form social bonds has been literally wired into our biology. When we make a positive social connection, the pleasure-inducing hormone oxytocin is released into our bloodstream, immediately reducing anxiety and improving concentration and focus. Each social connection also bolsters our cardiovascular, neuroendocrine, and immune systems, so that the more connections we make over time, the better we function.
We have such a biological need for social support, our bodies can literally malfunction without it. For instance, lack of social contact can add 30 points to an adult’s blood pressure reading. In his seminal book Loneliness, University of Chicago psychologist John Cacioppo compiled more than thirty years’ worth of research to convincingly show that a dearth of social connections is actually just as deadly as certain diseases. Naturally, it causes psychological harm as well; it shouldn’t surprise you that a national survey of 24,000 workers found that men and women with few social ties were two to three times more likely to suffer from major depression than people with strong social bonds.
When we enjoy strong social support, on the other hand, we can accomplish impressive feats of resilience, and even extend the length of our lives. One study found that people who received emotional support during the six months after a heart attack were three times more likely to survive. Another found that participating in a breast cancer support group actually doubled women’s life expectancy post surgery.” In fact, researchers have found that social support has as much effect on life expectancy as smoking, high blood pressure, obesity, and regular physical activity.” As one set of doctors put it, “When launching a life raft, the prudent survivalist will not toss food overboard while retaining the deck furniture. If somebody must jettison a part of life, time with a mate should be last on the list: He needs that connection to live.”” When set adrift, it seems, those of us who hold on to our raftmates, not just our rafts, are the ones who will stay afloat.
…studies have found that people with strong relationships are less likely to perceive situations as stressful in the first place.” So in essence, 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 the stress, you’ll bounce back from it faster and better protected against its long term negative effects.
Financial planners tell us that the surest way to grow our stock portfolios is to keep reinvesting the dividends. So it is with our social portfolios as well. Not only do we need to invest in new relationships, we should always be reinvesting in our current relationships because, like our stocks, social support networks grow stronger the longer they are held. Fortunately, there is a whole host of techniques we can use to aid us in this endeavor.
…neuroscience has revealed that when we make eye contact with someone, it actually sends a signal to the brain that triggers empathy and rapport. Ask interested questions, schedule face-to-face meetings, and initiate conversations that aren’t always task-oriented. A popular manager at a top 100 law firm once told me that he set out to learn one new thing about a co-worker each day, which he would then reference in later conversations.
We all know that an important part of maintaining a social bond is being there, both physically and emotionally, when someone is in need. But an interesting new body of research suggests that 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.4 The key to gaining these benefits is how you respond to someone’s good news.