Why are some people more successful than others? Talent, hard work, ambition, discipline or luck? That's certainly not wrong. However, Harvard professor Shawn Achor has found another interesting approach as part of his happiness research: Happiness and success are directly related - albeit the other way round than is commonly assumed.
Achor has been studying the question of what makes people happy for many years. As part of his research, he has also gained insights into what makes people successful. He summarises his "recipe" as follows: you don't have to be successful to be happy, you have to be happy to be successful.
Many people attach conditions to their happiness. They are convinced of a misconception that once I am rich/beautiful/successful/popular etc., I will also be happy. In the course of his research, Shawn Achor came to an astonishing conclusion: external circumstances are only ten percent decisive for a person's long-term happiness.
Conversely, the happiness researcher concludes that 90 percent of your happiness in life comes from within. How your brain perceives and processes the outside world is particularly crucial. In other words, whether it focuses on the positive or the negative in your life. Because no matter how privileged you are, your life will never be perfect, and so there will always be cause for unhappiness.
At the same time, there are people who impress us by the fact that they never seem to lose their radiant smile despite a difficult fate. Shawn Achor therefore comes to the conclusion that your happiness does not depend on your success. Instead, you can be perfectly happy without success.
He also found that people who are happy are also much more successful at work. The reason: the brain is much more productive in a positive state than in a negative one, by 31 percent. However, many of us are unable to utilize this 31 percent because - according to Achor - our society has made a crucial error in its thinking:
We believe that ...
- the harder we work, the more successful we become. This is part of our culture and the social consensus.
- we will be happier if we are more successful.
But this is a fallacy, claims Achor, who has travelled to 45 countries as part of his research. There, too, he found the same misconception in schools and companies: "Working harder leads to greater success." This guiding principle is omnipresent in both child education and management.
The negative effects of the conventional pursuit of happiness
Achor states: "Every time the brain registers a success, the bar is raised: 'You got good grades, now you have to work harder: You got good grades, now you need to get better grades. You've achieved your sales targets, now you need to raise them. If happiness is on the other side of success, the brain will never get there. We as a society have pushed happiness over our mental horizon because we believe we have to be successful to be happy. However, our brains work the other way round."
In his TED Talk - one of the most watched of all time with more than 13 million clicks - you can find out which five concrete steps he suggests to be happy and therefore successful in the next blog post.
