CHADE-MENG TAN:
Morning, everybody.
Thank you all for being here.
My name is Meng.
I'm the Jolly Good
Fellow of Google,
and I'm delighted to be
here with my friend Shawn,
a fellow Jolly Good
Fellow and also
a fellow international
bestselling author,
whose latest book is
"Before Happiness,"
available at all
major bookstores.
The first thing you need
to know about Shawn Achor
is that he is
genuinely really nice.
You know about his
public persona.
He's that nice,
smiling, happy guy.
And in person, he
is really that guy.
So that's the first
thing you need
to know about him, genuinely
beautiful human being.
The second thing you
need to know about Shawn
is that he has one of the
most popular TED Talks
ever, almost 6 million
views the last I checked,
like 5.9 million or something.
So if he has $1 per
view, he's going
to be the Six
Million Dollar Man.
He's going to run in
slow motion all the time.
His lectures airing on PBS
have been seen by millions.
He is the winner of a dozen
Distinguished Teaching Awards
at Harvard University,
a fairly good university
the last I heard.
Just kidding.
Shawn is one of the
world's leading experts
on the connection between
happiness and success,
and he has traveled
to 50 countries.
The first 49, it's kind of meh.
But 50, that was impressive.
With that, my friends, please
welcome my friend Shawn A.
SHAWN ACHOR: Thank you.
Thank you, everyone.
CHADE-MENG TAN: So thank
you for being here.
I've been looking
forward to having you
for a really long time.
SHAWN ACHOR: Me too.
I'm absolutely thrilled.
And thank you so
much for coming out.
It makes it so much more fun to
have even all the people that
are being streamed in.
So thank you.
CHADE-MENG TAN: So this is going
to be purely a conversation.
Q&A is a composition
between us and Shawn.
And I'm just going ask a
couple questions, and about
halfway into this
conversation we're
going to invite you
to ask him questions.
Feel free to embarrass him.
Don't embarrass me.
Embarrass this guy.
So Shawn, my first question
for you a very simple question,
how do you define happiness?
SHAWN ACHOR: It's actually
pretty difficult for us
to define it.
As Meng mentioned,
I've traveled to now
over 50 countries over
the past seven years
studying happiness,
which is great.
And one of the things that
I realized very quickly
was that everyone had
a different definition
of happiness, What they
thought would create happiness,
the triggers for
happiness seemed
to be different based
upon different cultures,
different individuals, even
at the same organization.
So if you can't define
it, maybe can't study it.
And if you can't
study it, then we
can't have things like
positive psychology
that are looking at how do
we raise levels of happiness
for other people.
Part of what we found is
that even though everyone
in this room and
everyone watching
has different
definitions of happiness,
if I ask you on a
scale of 1 to 10
how happy you felt over the
past two weeks, most of us
can kind of put ourselves
on that spectrum.
We can put ourselves
somewhere on that range.
What we found is that
even though that's
a subjective experience,
if I go into a hospital
with a broken arm, there's no
pain meter they can hook me
up to that automatically means
I'm experiencing an 8 out
of 10 on a pain scale, the
same thing is true happiness.
We treat people
based upon the pain
that they actually experience,
and we can actually
study people based upon
their subjective experience
of happiness that they're
experiencing in the world.
Part of what I'm hoping to
do and part of the reason I
wanted to come to
talk with you is
that what I'd love for us to do
is to help the world redefine
what happiness actually means.
Because I think that there's
a lot of confusion about
what happiness actually is.
And if we do come up with a
definition that's aspirational,
maybe we can start a movement
not only within our schools
and in our families but in
our companies worldwide.
There's a lot of articles
that are coming out right now
talking about how
having a happy life
and having a meaningful life
that a meaningful life is
so much better than having
a happy life in terms
of the levels of health you
experience in the long run.
I think those studies,
while well-meaning,
are actually leading us astray.
Because 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 very
short-term, right?
We could put chocolate bars
in front of each of you,
and then we'd be done in
terms of our happiness.
Somebody's like, wait, was
that an option this morning?
I didn't even know that
that would be an option.
CHADE-MENG TAN: It's Google.
It's always an option.
SHAWN ACHOR: Exactly.
Exactly.
You've got pleasure
at your fingertips,
but that doesn't necessarily
mean that you automatically
have happiness at
your fingertips.
Because happiness,
the way that we
are hoping to start your
redefine this for the world
is to not have
happiness be pleasure,
because that's very short-term.
And we get addicted to
It.
We were talking about
that this morning.
If happiness is just a pleasure,
it becomes a trap, right?
So if I'm not feeling
pleasure right now,
well, then I must not be happy.
Then I'm not going to
keep working at this,
or 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?
And I love this definition.
I was at the Divinity
School before getting
into studying
positive psychology,
and I was studying Christian
and Buddhist ethics.
Because I was interested
in how does the beliefs
you have about the
world change the actions
you decide to do
within that world.
And one of the things that I
loved about this definition
when I saw it is it changes the
way that we pursue happiness.
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 our 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,
or when you're biking into
and it's a really long bike
ride, whatever is it
you're experiencing.
Even childbirth is not
a pleasurable experience
all the time, but
you can actually
feel joy in the midst of that.
What I want people to do is
to recognize and to actually
seek out that joy, which I know
is one of your pet projects
as well.
How do you see joy, but joy
that's connected to growth?
Because if happiness is actually
disconnected from growth,
it turns out we stagnate
and our happiness
goes away pretty quickly.
I love playing video games.
I love them.
And they're very high levels of
pleasure, and I'm OK at them.
But in terms of
long-term meaning,
there's not too much
for me in my life.
Now for some people, there's a
lot of meaning in video games.
But for me, not so much.
So if I keep doing it, even
though I'm having pleasure
that pleasure actually
dissipates after a while,
because I'm not actually
pursuing any of my potential
except within that one domain.
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 than we actually
strive towards that potential,
that's where people
experience that greater
levels of happiness,
and it allows
us to stop making that disjunct
between happiness and success.
Because I was out in Indonesia,
and I was speaking out
at one of the factories there.
And one of the managers
came up to me and said,
this talk on happiness might
work at places like Google
or it might work in
places in America,
but seriously actually our
problem in our country is not
that people are unhappy work.
Our problem is sometimes
people are way too happy.
Because I had this guy come into
work three hours late today,
and I tried to yell at
him, and he was like,
what are you doing?
Let's just relax and
just enjoy ourselves.
And I was like, that guy
didn't make me happy at all.
But what he's talking about
there is not happiness, right?
That's short-term pleasure.
The guy decide to
stay home that morning
and didn't do the work that
he was supposed to be doing.
But if that's what
it is, then long-term
his levels of happiness are
actually going to decrease.
He's never going to get to
see what his potential was
within that organization.
He might not get to see
what his potential was
in terms of applying his
self-control and his behavior
to his task.
So what we want people
to do is to recognize
that that can be more
on the side of apathy.
I think the opposite of
happiness is not unhappiness.
The opposite of
happiness is apathy,
which is the loss of joy that
we feel within our lives.
Because if you think about
it, unhappiness can sometimes
make us breakup with people
we shouldn't be dating.
Or unhappiness can cause us
to move to do different jobs,
or it can cause us to want to
get better grades in school.
Unhappiness can be very helpful.
What I think becomes
the problem is
when we've lost that
joy in our life, when
we lose that joy striving
towards our potential.
So I think that there's a
revolution inside of us.
If we can help people
realize that happiness is joy
that we feel on the
way to our potential,
some amazing things
start to change.
CHADE-MENG TAN: Fascinating.
It's especially
fascinating in the context
of one of your teachings
from your previous book,
which I thought was
ground-breaking.
And when I first read it,
I was really impressed.
In your previous book, which
is "The Happiness Advantage,"
you talk about the relationship
between happiness and success.
And you put it on
its head, the reverse
of what everybody
else was thinking.
SHAWN ACHOR: Yeah.
CHADE-MENG TAN:
Which is everybody
was thinking that if you're
successful, you're happy,
which is basically the
premise of Asian parenting.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
CHADE-MENG TAN: Right?
Trust me, I know.
But what you say,
and I agree with you,
is that it's the reverse.
It's that happiness
brings about success.
So can you talk more about that?
SHAWN ACHOR: Sure.
So you guys might have heard
"The Battle Hymn of the Tiger
Mother" book that came out
about tiger parenting, which
is the style of parenting
you're describing,
which is I'm going to
push you so far right now,
and you're going to hate me for
it, but when you're successful,
when you're off at
Harvard, Stanford,
when you've got a good job,
then you're going to be happier.
CHADE-MENG TAN: Right.
SHAWN ACHOR: And it turns
out that that formula, which
undergirds our managing styles
at most companies, our learning
styles, our personal
development styles, it's
scientifically broken and
backwards for two reasons.
The first reason is that every
time your brain has a success--
and you've experienced this.
Everyone in this
room has experienced
this-- your brain just
changes the goal post of what
success looks like for
you almost immediately.
You've got good
grades in school?
Don't get excited
yet, because now you
need to get into better schools.
You got into a better school?
Don't get excited there, because
then you have to get a job.
You don't even have
a job yet, right?
So you have to get that
internship and job.
You hit your sales target?
We raise your sales target.
You had double growth
earnings last year?
That's phenomenal.
That means we can double
the growth again this year.
And that's not the problem.
We want to see what your
brain is capable of.
We want growth to improve.
We want to see
sales improve, all
of these different
types of things.
The problem is where happiness
comes in that formula.
Because if happiness
comes after success,
which is a moving
target, the brain
never gets there for very long.
We can raise your success
rates your entire life.
We can raise your income.
We don't actually do this.
We watch people whose
success rates rise.
That'd be very
hard for us to do.
We watch people whose success
rates rise dramatically,
and their happiness
levels flatline.
They actually don't move.
So 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.
So raised success rates,
happiness flatlines.
But raise levels of happiness
withinside organizations
and schools, and
their success rates
rise dramatically,
which is phenomenal.
I spent 12 years at Harvard,
first as an undergraduate
and then I was at
Divinity School,
and then I was a
teaching fellow there.
And when I first got into
Harvard, I applied on a dare,
so I didn't expect to get in.
We didn't have any
money for college,
but I got a Navy
ROTC scholarship,
which allowed me to
go there through MIT.
And so I found myself in
classrooms full of people
who were incredibly smart
and were just amazing.
And I remember that I could
have felt bad about myself,
like the mistake, but I remember
just sitting there thinking
this is amazing to get
to have the opportunity
like this morning,
to get to spend time
with all these incredibly
brilliant and motivated people.
And you can look around,
and for many of you--
I know some of you are
from Harvard, actually--
and you could see
the students who
saw their education
as a privilege.
They saw what they were
doing as an opportunity,
and they invested in it in
completely different ways.
They'd take classes that
they'd get a bad grade in,
like an A-minus, just
because they wanted to learn.
Or they'd get involved
with a sport--
CHADE-MENG TAN:
Obviously not Asian.
That's like an Asian C.
SHAWN ACHOR: Exactly.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: I like that.
CHADE-MENG TAN:
I'm just kidding.
Almost.
SHAWN ACHOR: We'd
have people that
would ride the bench on
a sport for three years
just so they could
make friends, and those
are the people who
loved their time there.
And actually, in
one of our studies
we found that those
are the people who
give the most in
alumni donations
back to the school
later on, which
is why Harvard got interested
in happiness in the first place.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: But afterwards,
I got the opportunity
to stay at Harvard.
I knew that if I left they
wouldn't let me back in.
And so I stayed there
for the next eight years,
and I lived in the dorms with
the freshman as a Proctor
there.
And Harvard invited me to do
that-- I wasn't that guy who
stays in the freshman dorms
meeting people-- for most
of it.
So what it meant was I could
watch these students transition
from high school to college.
And what I saw very
quickly was no matter
how happy they were getting into
that school, two weeks later,
many of them, their
brains were not
focused on the privilege of
being there or even fully
focused on their
philosophy or physics.
Their brains were scattered
thinking about the competition,
the workload, the stresses,
the hassles, and complaints.
And very quickly, what was
promised to create great
happiness wasn't.
80% of Harvard students,
according to the "Crimson" poll
that they had, 80%
of them reported
experiencing depression at
sometime during the four years
there.
And a study that came out in
2003 by the University Health
Services, they measured
6,000 undergraduates
and found that 10% of them
had contemplated suicide
at some point during
their time there,
which is extraordinarily high.
And I know that
these are statistics,
but those are human beings.
And it was heartbreaking
watching some of these students
and some of the
people that we know
lose that connection to meaning
in their life and the potential
that they had.
One of the studies that
I got to do early on
was I looked at 1,600
Harvard students
to find out who
rises to the top.
If you have people that
are extremely intelligent,
extremely successful,
ambitious, who
rises to the top in terms of
their happiness and success?
And I looked at everything.
I looked at what grades
they got in school.
I looked at their
familial income.
We looked at the SAT scores
before getting into school.
We looked at the number
of friends on Facebook.
We looked at the number
of romantic partners
that they had had.
Which by the way,
at Harvard they've
dated less than one
person, on average,
after their entire
four years of college.
CHADE-MENG TAN:
Must be engineering?
I don't know.
SHAWN ACHOR: Yeah.
Possibly.
It was lower than any
school we saw so far.
It was actually 0.5 sexual
partners per Harvard student.
CHADE-MENG TAN:
Yep, engineering.
SHAWN ACHOR: Yeah.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: Which I only
mention because I don't even
know what that
statistic means, 0.5.
We were always
taught to round up.
CHADE-MENG TAN: Better than MIT.
SHAWN ACHOR: Possibly.
Probably.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: But
0.5 sexual partners,
it's the scientific
equivalent of second base,
and it was useless
information to us.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: What we did find
was imagine a student who
ever since they
were one-year-old
was placed into a crib wearing
a onesie that you can buy
at the bookstore, at The Coop,
that says "Bound for Harvard"
and maybe a cute little Yale
hat, in case something terrible
happened.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: And
ever since there
were in special pre-K school
that they got into four years
before they were
conceived, they were
at the top 1% of their class.
Junior high, high school,
standardized tests, top 1%.
They get into Harvard, and they
have a terrible realization.
50% of them are
now below average.
And to put it more
poignantly, when
I was counseling students
I would tell them
it seems as if 99%
of Harvard students
do not graduate in
the top 1%, which
they don't find funny at all.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: But the
reason that's interesting
is they decide
the only way I can
be happy is if I'm in the
top 1% of one category of one
institution, right?
Not worldwide.
And they pick
grades-- which if you
know the research on grades,
you can roll a pair of dice,
and that's as predictive
of your future job success
as your college GPA
is, which is why
a lot of people who make
straight A's in college
work for people who got
straight C's in business school.
Some of you are like, yep.
But part of what I
think is fascinating--
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: What I think
is so fascinating about this
is that we've got the
formula backwards.
They thought, well, if I
got into a good school,
if I got a great job, if I
got to where I am in life,
of course I'd be happier.
And it turns out that
it doesn't automatically
cause greater
levels of happiness.
But amazingly, the formula could
actually work in the other way.
We found something that we now
call the happiness advantage,
which is when the brain
is positive it has
an unfair advantage over the
brain at negative, neutral,
or stressed.
You're 31% more productive.
Sales rise from a
neutral salesperson
to the same salesperson
at optimistic by 37%.
We found that people who
provide social support work,
you're 40% more likely
to receive a promotion
over the next two-year
period of time.
We find that you live longer.
We just did a study, actually.
I love this study.
I got to work with
one of my friends
who w one of my students
at Harvard, Alia Crum.
And she went off to Yale.
We did a joint study
at UBS in the middle
of the banking crisis,
the big Swiss bank.
And one of the things
we were looking for
is that oftentimes
the companies would
want to push you very hard, and
then your stress levels rise,
and then they give you a
stress management program.
And the stress
management program
goes something like this.
Did you know that stress is
related to the 10 leading
causes of death and disease
in the United States?
Did you know that the
World Health Organization
found stress to be
the number one killer?
Stress is related to 80% to 90%
of all doctor-related visits.
And stress is catabolic.
It literally tears down every
organ in the human body.
As soon as you hear that,
what do you think it?
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: More stress.
You're like, stop
emailing me so much work.
You're destroying every
organ in my body, which
I think would make a great
away message at work.
But part of what we found
is that all of that's true.
All of that information
is absolutely true.
Stress is terrible killer.
But just like with Vitamin
C and coffee and alcohol,
we keep finding
studies that are like,
alcohol will save your
life, and it will kill you.
Vitamin C causes cancer
and cures cancer.
And we get so frustrated.
We're like, well, what
am I supposed to do?
Am I supposed to
drink coffee or not?
Am I supposed to
drink red wine or not?
The reason is that it's less
about the external world
but about how your
body and your brain
process what comes into your
system and what you experience.
The same thing's
true with stress.
So there's an equally
true information
that says that stress actually
releases a growth hormone that
speeds up the
recovery of your cells
faster than anything we've seen.
Not low levels of stress
but moderate to high
levels of stress actually
turn on your immune system
to the highest possible level.
We found that stress deepens
your social bonds more
than anything, which is
why last week I was out
working at the Pentagon, and one
of the things they were saying
is that's why we on-board
people in the military
with bootcamp and
not a beach vacation,
because we know that that
stressful period doesn't
tear people down.
It actually causes them
to create these meaning
structures, these narratives,
and these relationships
that they talk about for the
entire rest of their life.
In fact, every moment
of high human potential
occurs in the midst of
stress, not the absence of it.
So what we did is we
just showed them videos
and created a small
training for the UBS
employees in the middle
of a banking crisis
when they went through
four restructurings
and they were told that
they didn't get their bonus.
One of my very first
talks was actually
at a Swiss bank out in Zurich.
And the introduction
was, we don't
have bonuses for everyone,
but here's a talk
on happiness from
a guy from America.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
CHADE-MENG TAN: Yay.
SHAWN ACHOR: Exactly.
Which is amazing,
because they immediately
stonewalled the information.
But 10 minutes later,
as soon as they
started hearing that
there's research about this,
suddenly things
started to change.
Because it wasn't
about just, oh, let's
be happier in the midst
of this challenge.
It was like, here's how we can
actually change the way that we
view this world and
actually ripple this out
to other people around us.
I'm going off track.
We can come back to that.
But the part of what I found was
so interesting about the stress
study was we had two groups.
One group saw stress
as debilitating,
and one group saw
stress as enhancing.
And we tracked them
for the next six weeks.
And I was hoping that the group
that saw stress as enhancing
would actually have
lower levels of stress.
That was my hope,
and we were wrong.
Turns out they had equal levels
of stress and extremely high.
But their health-related
symptoms, their back aches,
headaches, and fatigue,
their energy levels at work
improved by 23% for the group
that saw stress as enhancing,
a nearly 30% increase
in their productivity,
and their levels of
happiness improved.
What that means is stress
is inevitable in our lives,
but the way that we
perceive stress changes how
it affects the human body.
And the reason why we feel such
a negative effect from stress
is because stress should
be meaningful, right?
If I tell you your inbox is
full of spam, you're like, OK,
I don't care.
But if your inbox
is full of things
you need to get back that
you wanted to get back
to that are meaningful for
your job or connections
you want to make, suddenly
you care about it.
Or if I tell somebody that
somebody's kid is failing
English, they don't really care.
If their kid's failing English,
they care a whole bunch.
Stress has meaning in it.
But when we separate the energy
from stress from meaning,
that's when we get these
negative health effects.
So what we found is we can
actually train people out
of these ideas,
which is incredible.
So all we have to do is deepen
somebody's social connection,
change their optimism, or change
the way that they view stress,
and we can actually improve
every single business
and educational outcome
worldwide, which is incredible.
CHADE-MENG TAN: Lovely.
Your first book, that really
spoke to me on one level.
Because when you talk about
the happiness advantage,
like happiness before
success, I reflect on my life.
And for me, I'm a meditator.
I've been doing it 20 years.
And if your meditation
practice is deep enough,
you get into a
state where you are
happy independent of
sensations and thoughts.
You are just happy.
And then everything you
experience is bonus.
And then I found that
when I'm consistently
in that from of mind I
became even more successful.
And what you gave me was the
vocabulary and the research
to understand this
whole experience.
So I'm really grateful
to you for that.
So for me, I decided to
dedicate my life to creating
the conditions for world
peace by making peace, joy,
and compassion
universally accessible.
And I know that's what
you want to do as well.
And so my question next to
you is, how do you spread it?
How do spread happiness?
You and maybe in general.
How do you spread
happiness in general?
SHAWN ACHOR: Well,
we're actually
helped out by our brains.
One of the things that I've
found so incredible in some
of this research that's coming
out is one of the experiments
that I have people do
in some of my talks--
which actually we can do
it right now, if you want.
Let's do it real quickly.
So you don't have to do any
of my experiments today.
I'm not allowed to bring
consent forms to talks,
because we had an electric shock
problem a couple years ago.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: But here's
what I need you to do.
And you can do
this even if you're
watching from a remote location.
All I need you to do is
just partner up with someone
that's sitting next to you.
Partner up into pairs of two.
Of course pairs of two.
Partner up into pairs.
The only caveat is legally I'm
required to tell you you cannot
partner up with someone that
you're married to for this
experiment or that you
want to be married to.
So move around if you're
struggling with this.
CHADE-MENG TAN: You
know who you are.
SHAWN ACHOR: Yes, exactly.
So does everyone have a partner?
You can move closer, because
you need to sit next to them.
So here's what I need you to do.
The person that's sitting
closest to this wall,
to the exits is your person
number one in the pair.
The person furthest
from that wall,
you're person number
two in the pair.
If you're remote, just pick
one person to be number one.
Some of you are
like, I already knew
I was person number
one in this pair.
There should be a two
and a one in each group.
So raise your hand if
you're person number one.
Raise your hand if
you're person number two.
OK.
That's not the experiment.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: I have to do that.
Because I did this experiment
on Wall Street a couple months
ago, and it literally took that
struggling bank five minutes
to figure out who number
one in the group was.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: Which explains
what's going on there.
So here's what I need you to do.
How many of you, by the way,
have a psychology background,
read a lot of psychology
books, studied psychology?
OK.
So for my psychology
friends, this
is the emotional prime
of the experiment.
For everyone else,
this is nothing.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: But here's
what we ask you to do.
Over the course of
your life, you've
taken your genes, your
genetic predispositions,
you've beat both those genes
out through your self-discipline
and your self-control.
You were able to pass the
classes that you needed to
in school to get
into the schools
you wanted to to apply yourself
to your job here at Google.
What I'd love for
you to do is to use
all of that
self-discipline and control
that you've been
cultivating for decades,
and I'd like you to use it to
control your behavior for just
seven seconds of this
experiment, if you can.
At eight seconds,
you can do whatever
you want to or
with your partner.
But for seven
seconds, you're mine.
So what we ask you do in this
experiment, person number one,
is to not get angry
with person number
two when they do to you
what I'm about to tell
them to do to you.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: Don't get angry.
Don't get sad.
Please, please don't cry like
the group at the Pentagon.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: I was
so embarrassed.
CHADE-MENG TAN: Those generals.
SHAWN ACHOR: Person
number one, you basically
are going to do nothing
with person number two.
So person number one and
two, please turn and face
one another.
Person number one,
make sure you're
within striking distance
of person number two.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: And
person number one, just
go neutral on the inside.
Try to feel no emotions,
and try and think
no thoughts, which
for some of you
might be extremely
easy right now.
Then control your hands,
person number one.
Don't move your hands
even to defend yourself
from person number two.
And person number one,
just control your face.
Show zero emotion on your face.
No fear, no flinching, no
frustration, zero emotion.
Once you're ready,
person number one,
you're using your decades
of self-discipline
to control the control your
thoughts, your emotions,
your hands, and your face.
Then person number two,
please turn to them,
make sure you're
looking at them directly
in the eyes, and for
the next seven seconds,
person number two, please just
smile genuinely and warmly
but directly up
into the eyes while
looking at them
warmly and deeply.
Ready?
Go.
Some of you already failed.
And stop.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: So we're
going to switch it around,
because some of you
were terrible at that.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: Just switch
it around real quick.
My psychology friends know
you never repeat a psychology
experiment with some
form of deception in it,
but just switch it around.
It's incredibly easy,
we know at this point,
for person number to
control themselves.
But just try it.
Person number two, go
neutral on the inside.
Using your self-discipline
and control
that makes you a lot more
successful than person number
one is at life, just
control yourself.
And person number
one, look at them.
Make sure you look at them
directly, deeply, warmly
in the eyes.
And for the next seven seconds,
it's your turn for retaliation.
Go.
And stop.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: So what I
love about this experiment
is even if you're
successful at it,
as soon as you say stop
people relax as if that was
the hardest thing they had to
do all day, which literally was
doing nothing for
the seven seconds.
But first of all, I'm
just curious in this room,
it's a quiet room, so it's hard.
This experiment
works much better
if you've got more
priming going on.
But I'm just curious,
failure at this experiment
means you smiled when
I asked you not to,
and success means that
you did not smile.
Raise your hand if you failed
miserably at this by smiling.
Oh, OK.
So a lot of you.
That's terrible.
Raise your hand if
you successfully
did what I asked you to
for the full seven seconds.
So 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,
10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17,
18.
18 liars.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: What we find is--
CHADE-MENG TAN: Pants on fire.
SHAWN ACHOR: Exactly.
Actually, I don't know
why I counted you,
because I don't know how
many people are in the room.
But what we find is 80% to
85% of people worldwide cannot
control themselves for the seven
seconds of this experiment.
I did this with senior-level
bankers, all men,
all in their mid-50s
in Tokyo, Japan,
and the smile
percentage was 77%.
What we're finding is
it's extremely universal.
You mentioned I've been
to over 50 countries,
and I've done this
experiment in all of them.
But one I made a mistake with.
And this gets directly
back your question.
But I wanted to
tell you about this.
So last year I got invited by
the royal family in Abu Dhabi,
as one does, to get to
give a talk on happiness.
And I was so excited
about this opportunity
that I went over there and was
meeting all of these people
that I'd never met before
and been to a place I'd never
had that I wasn't thinking
when I got into the talk,
because I was too excited.
And one of the talks there was
for 300 women in the Middle
East about how we can raise
up levels of happiness
and positive leadership there.
And some of you are
smiling because you
know the mistake I made.
I tried the smiling experiment
in the talk and only
halfway through realized
that 90% of the room
was veiled for the
smiling experiment, which
had I thought it before I would
not have made that mistake.
But I'm so grateful I did,
because the women in the room
taught me something.
They told me that
the experiment still
worked because they could see
the smile in the other woman's
eyes.
And even behind the veil,
the smile was contagious.
The reason why this is so
fascinating is what we found
is inside the human brain, what
we discovered also by accident
is over the past 15 years
we've discovered these things
in the human brain
called mirror neurons.
So if you put me into
a fMRI brain scan,
scan my brain while I'm
smiling, parts of my brain
will show activation
telling me that I'm smiling.
But if I stop
smiling, which is what
you were just trying to do,
and someone smiles at you
or you see a picture
of somebody smiling,
those small parts
of your brain called
mirror neurons will
show activation,
and they'll tell you you're
the one that's smiling.
And your motor neurons
will cause your face
to contort into a smile
before you can stop yourself,
because you already
think you're smiling.
So if you were looking
at your partner
and their lips were
quivering while they
were trying not to
smile, that's weird.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: That
shouldn't be happening.
But what's occurring there
is their mirror neurons
are fighting against
their motor neurons.
Your brain already
thinks you're smiling,
so it's like, what's
the problem here,
face, as your brain
is trying to find out
what's going on between those.
These happen with yawns.
So if you see somebody yawn,
our likelihood of yawning
increases because
our brain actually
tells we're the
one that's yawning.
But why this is so
fascinating and why
this is crucial to
this contagious effect
that we can have is it
turns out that if you
have 15 strangers waiting for
a plane-- they don't even know
they're part experiment yet.
They're just at an
airport-- and you
introduce an
undercover researcher,
a confederate to stand in
the middle of the 15 people
and bounce nervously in place,
tap his foot on the floor
and look at his watch repeatedly
with a frown on his face,
within two minutes of waiting
for that plane or train,
depending on the study, 7 to
12 of the 15 individuals will
unconsciously start
bouncing nervously in place
and/or tapping their
foot on the ground
and/or looking at their
watch more than four times
in two minutes.
If you don't believe
me, this is one
of the experiments
you can do yourself
the next time you
get on a plain,
if you want to spread
stress and negativity--
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: --to the
people on your plane,
which is why do this
at a different gate.
But the reason I love
this experiment--
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: --is it shows
this, that not only do smiles
and yawns spread, it turns
out negativity, stress,
uncertainty, pessimism we can
pick up like secondhand smoke.
You can be optimistic,
but if you're
surrounded by people
who are negative,
your brain through these
mirror neurons can pick it up.
And when we tell people
that, they're like, OK.
Well, here are the people
I'm cutting out of my life.
I'm not going to hang
out with this person.
I'm going to de-friend
them on Facebook.
I'm not even going to look
at this person anymore, which
is awkward because
they're in my family.
And what happens is in
each one of those moments
we're eliminating
social connection.
But these mirror neurons
give us the power
to actually spread positive
change even better.
Because as we've
been studying you,
we've been studying you wrong.
There's no wires
connecting your brains.
There's no organic material.
So we've made the
mistake of assuming
that all of your brains were
separate, and they're not.
It misses out on how beautiful
the human organism actually
is, because our brains
are not wired together.
Our brains are
wirelessly connected
through a mirror neuron network.
Your thoughts right now are
changing your nonverbals,
how you're sitting here, which
is changing the way that people
sitting next to you are
processing this information.
We're in a continual
feedback loop with the people
that we walk past
in the cafeteria.
We're in a continual
feedback loop
with our family members
and our friends.
And what we found
is if we can buffer
our brain against the
negative, if we can create even
a single positive change in
our life, meditation, exercise,
gratitude, whatever
it is you're doing,
we can actually watch
that positive effect
that's occurring in your
brain wirelessly impact
the people's brains of
the people around you.
One of the opportunities
I got last year
was to work at a hospital.
And hospitals have
a terrible time,
because when you
think about hospitals
you think about sickness
and disease, Right?
And you can't change that.
But we went into
the Ritz Carlton
to figure out what
they were doing
to get people to
love coming there.
And they have nice
buildings, but one
of the things that
the train-- maybe you
know this-- they teach
them to do something
called the 10-5
Way, which is if you
walk within 10 feet of
somebody at a Ritz Carlton,
they're trained to make eye
contact and smile at you.
And within 5 feet, the employees
are trained to say hello.
It's actually really
fun to go in and out
of those sphere with
them at the Ritz,
even if you're
not staying there.
But what we love
about the experience
is that we could import
it down to this hospital,
to these groups of hospitals.
And we trained them
post-Katrina down in Louisiana.
And some of the doctors
were like, why would you
have to train people to smile?
Isn't that human nature?
But then other doctors
were like, uh, you
hired me to save people's lives.
It doesn't matter how I
walked down the hallways.
I save people's lives.
That's what I'm hired for.
I'm not going to do this stupid
smiling initiative from HR.
So we said, that's fine.
But then we trained
11,000 of their coworkers
to make eye contact and
smile and to do the 10-5 Way.
And what happens is
everyone started picking up
the pattern, the doctors,
and nurses, the staff.
But the cool part
was the patients,
who didn't know
what was going on,
picked up and then started
initiating the social script,
because they were learning that
when I walk down this hallway
I'm supposed to treat people
as if they're human beings.
We pick up social
scripts all the time.
If you get onto subway in
New York or The T in Boston,
you start smiling,
some people start
moving away from you, right?
Because we know
the social script.
Let's not necessarily
do eye contact,
and let's not actually
smile at strangers.
We know that rule.
But part of what we
were finding was not
only did hospital
hallways change,
which would be a cute story
about how hospitals can change,
what I was interested
in is what happened
six months later to
their business outcome.
Six months later, the
hospitals that did this,
they saw a significant increase
in their unique patients
that came to the hospital.
The likelihood of
patients to refer
the care, the quality of care
that they received skyrocketed.
And the doctors'
happiness level at work
were the highest not only
in the hospital chain
but in a decade at
that organization.
That's a one-second
behavioral change
that shows we can change the
social script around this
and actually impact not only
our happiness but the quality
of care that we provide
and our business outcomes.
My question-- and it's the one
that you have been championing
here at Google-- is, what if
we had more than one second
with somebody?
What if we could change
somebody not just short-term?
But what if we could
actually change the very lens
with which we viewed the world?
And that's where things become
really powerful, I think.
CHADE-MENG TAN: I have
a suggestion for that--
SHAWN ACHOR: Yes.
CHADE-MENG TAN: --wish
is to look at human being
and to think, I wish for
this person to be happy.
You don't have to
do or say anything.
Just think.
And that thought alone
changes everything.
Because it changes
your facial expression,
changes your behavior,
and eventually people,
they like each other, and
they don't really know why.
This operates on an
unconscious level.
SHAWN ACHOR: Yeah.
CHADE-MENG TAN: So I
suggest that to everybody,
that one thought.
I wish for this guy to be happy.
And then leave it at that.
See what happens.
SHAWN ACHOR: That's cool.
CHADE-MENG TAN: Oh, I love
how you say it's beautiful.
I see it, and I raise you one--
SHAWN ACHOR: OK.
CHADE-MENG TAN:
--which is I think
that in addition
happiness is contagious.
The other thing I found to
be contagious is calmness.
If you walk into a room in
a meditative, calm state,
no matter how bad things
are, if you walk in
and sit down meditatively
calm, it starts to spread.
People start calming down.
So for those of you
who are meditators,
practice that in a meeting
where things are not going well.
Give that a try.
See if you can change anything.
And sometimes people notice.
That guy, every time he walks
in the room, something changes.
See if that happens to you.
SHAWN ACHOR: That's cool.
CHADE-MENG TAN: Which leads
me to the next question.
The thing I really like
about this book are
two words that you use,
which I thought was genius.
And the words you use
are positive genius.
And can you talk about
what is a positive genius
and how that relates to
happiness and success?
SHAWN ACHOR: Sure.
So only 25% of your
successes here at Google
are predicted based
upon your intelligence
and technical skills.
CHADE-MENG TAN: The rest
is their good looks, right?
SHAWN ACHOR: The
rest are good looks.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: Which we know from
tech, financials, and medicals,
where I thought IQ would
matter more, it doesn't.
About 25% of job success is
predicted by how smart you are.
75% of your successes
are predicted
by three other
factors, your optimism,
the belief that your
behavior matters,
your social connections, and
the way you perceive stress.
What we found are that
there's these individuals
and organizations-- and not
even organizations, nonprofits
and families-- that we call
positive geniuses, who,
regardless of the environment
that they find themselves in,
are able to continually
architect these realities that
cause them to see past to not
only success but to happiness
as well.
Your brains are phenomenal.
Some of you are like,
yeah, I knew that.
That's why I work here.
But your brain can
process about 40 bits
of information per second,
which is really fast.
The only problem is your brain
receives 11 million pieces
of information per second from
all of your nerve endings.
So as you're constructing
a picture of the world,
your brain picks and chooses
two to four small facts,
and then you architect an
entire reality around them.
And if we know what those
facts are for you, if we
hear how you're describing
your work or your relationships
or your life, those facts
you go to immediately,
those actually predict
not only your levels
of happiness and
your stress levels
and how calm you are, but it
predicts your success rates,
your educational outcomes, your
health outcomes in the future.
Part of what we found is
that these positive geniuses
have practiced or have
created these patterns where
they can continually architect
these positive realities over
and over again.
And what I loved
about this is it
was something that
could be taught.
I think one of the deepest and
coolest parts of this research
in positive psychology
is this idea
that I believe at base is
just that change is possible,
which I actually think
most people would give
lip service to but don't
actually believe that.
Because I think most people
think that just their genes
are their environment,
that that person's happy
because they were born happy.
Or I'm happy because
I was born optimistic
or my parents were
optimistic, and that's
the end of the story.
Or there are some people
that are pessimistic as well.
There is a researcher up in
Minnesota who's studying twins.
And they found if you
take identical twins
and raise them apart--
they were already
going to be raised apart.
They didn't do
that for the study,
but that they have
identical twins raised
different families, different
environment, same genes,
and what they found is,
on average, the levels
of happiness were very similar.
So he concluded 80% of
your long-term happiness
is based upon your
genes, which actually I
believe most people believe.
They think the majority
of our happiness
is based upon the way your brain
was wired from the beginning.
And if you believe
that statement,
you have to believe
the next one, which
is his famous statement.
Stop trying to change
your happiness.
You're as likely to
change your happiness
as to change your
height, which is also
80% determined by genes.
He's since recanted that
statement, because it turns out
he was only half right,
which in this case
makes him fully wrong.
Because genes do set
the initial baseline.
We can shine a light
at a three-day-old,
and if they turn towards that
light and that auditory click,
they're trying to increase
their neocortical arousal,
and they're more likely to
be an extrovert at age 10.
They turn away from
it, and they're
more likely to be an introvert.
That's day three.
We haven't even had time to
screw them up yet, right?
They've got these
predispositions for this.
Some of you,
genetically happiness
is a much easier choice
than it is for other people.
Same thing with obesity,
with alcoholism,
all of these different
types of things.
But that's only the
beginning of the story.
The reason why we keep finding
genes to be so important
is that average person
doesn't fight their genes.
And if you've seen my TED Talk,
one of the things I talk about
is how most of
our research we're
interested in the average.
We want to find out how many
aspirin the average person
should take if they
get a headache, which
we should already see a problem.
Because regardless if you're
90 pounds or 250 pounds, yeah,
about two pills should do it.
But as soon as we ask
questions about potential,
about happiness, about
optimism, about success,
those are a different
group of questions.
And when we ask questions
like that, what we do
is we create a cult
of the average.
Because if we ask questions
like, how fast can
a child learn how to
read?-- and in our research,
we changed it to, how fast
does the average child
learn how to read, and then
we tailor the classes right
towards that average.
Same thing with genes.
If we look at how much genes
matter, we look at the average,
and the average
person does not fight
their genes and
their environment.
But if you look at those same
graphs with those same twins,
we find that they can
scatter dramatically
from their genetic set point
and from our environment.
Only 10% of your long-term
levels of happiness
are predicted based
upon the external world.
90% of your long-term
levels of happiness
is predicted by how your brain
processes that external world.
And one of the things we found--
and there might be people
here in the room, you've
seen a change in your life.
You've actually seen how you've
become more optimistic or more
jaded in your life, whatever
direction you've been going on
that trajectory-- I was
telling you this morning,
I had an identical twin come
up to me after one of my talks
and she said, I used to be
a very negative person, just
like my sister, but now
I'm extremely positive.
I'm like, that's amazing.
What did you do?
How did you break that
cycle from your genes?
That's what I study.
And she thought about it,
and she was like, actually,
I think it happened
when I was 15.
I was involved in a horrific
car accident, and I almost died.
And I realized that
life was a privilege
and that I had a whole
new lease on life.
And from then on,
I've seen the world
in a completely different way.
What I love about that is that's
a trauma that caused growth.
It wasn't just
post-traumatic stress,
which is all we hear about.
But actually, it was trauma
that caused somebody to not only
grow, create post-traumatic
growth but a deviation
from our genes.
And that is what I find that
these 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
that you've been doing here
at Google and the programs
where you get people
to create these ideas,
if you take advantage of some
of the exercise equipment
and all of the incredible
things you have,
you can actually get people to
change from their genetic set
point and create a whole new
trajectory, which is amazing.
CHADE-MENG TAN: Yeah.
Thank you.
So Alex has the mic.
Let's get some questions
from the audience.
Yeah, Alex, you get to choose
who to give the mic to.
He has the power.
AUDIENCE: Hi.
A direct follow-up to
what you just said.
I grew up with the
quote 10% of the world
is what you make
of it, and 90% is
how you take it, which is
kind of what you just said.
You said 90% of
your happiness is
based on how you process
your external world.
Do you have some
scientific fact?
How did you come
up with that 90%?
Because before I thought
that that was made up.
SHAWN ACHOR: Yeah.
That research comes
from a researcher
named Sonja Lyubomirsky.
And part of what they
were looking at initially
was if we know your
external world,
we can predict short-term
happiness very easily.
If a stock goes
down, your happiness
goes down, unless
you short the stock.
Or if something
bad happens to you,
immediately you have
a response period.
If you don't actually have a
response period completely,
sometimes that can
actually be problematic.
I don't study people that
are happy all the time,
because that can actually be a
form of a disorder where they
don't--
CHADE-MENG TAN: Or
they live in Colorado.
SHAWN ACHOR: Exactly.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: So
anyway, what they
found was your happiness levels
in aggregate over time, which
is when we watch your
patterns move, only 10% of it
was predicted by any of
those external factors
that we were looking for.
So the rest of it
had to be determined
based upon your genes and what
she calls the voluntary actions
you make in your life.
Those are the habits.
I like where she's
going with this,
and it's helpful sometimes
to say those things.
But I also think we get
stuck with the percentages.
Because if I'm born with genes
for pessimism-- actually,
I was born probably with
genes for depression.
I actually went through two
years of depression myself
when I was at Harvard while
I was at the Divinity School.
And as I was coming out of that,
what was helping me pull out
of it was positive psychology
and some of these habits
that we were doing.
I was doing this journaling
exercise where you actually
journal about
positive experience
and meaningful
experience over the day.
And because our
brains can't tell
the difference
between visualization
and actual experience,
it doubles the experience
for the brain, and you
start to see more meaning.
Even though I have
genes for that,
I don't actually experience
depression very much any more.
And when I start to go down
into a trough a little bit,
I know it's short-lived, and I
can actually pop back out of it
faster and faster now.
And if that's the
case, then how much are
the genes mattering
at this point?
Are the genes starting
to go from 40% down
to 30% down to 0%?
If I have genes for
pessimism but I'm
acting like an optimist,
maybe they have 0% of effect
upon people.
So part of what I think
is just the recognition
that the external
world does not have
a tyranny over people's
levels of happiness, which
is why if you've
traveled a lot you've
seen-- I've worked with very
wealthy bankers who have just
been so depressed and devastated
in the middle of a banking
crisis.
And I've worked with
farmers in Zimbabwe who
lost their land who are living
under a military dictator,
and they're some of the
most optimistic people
I've ever met.
So I think it goes
with the common sense
that we can find people
within every environment that
are positive and negative.
I think the key, though,
is how do we view reality.
Because I was actually
out in northern California
out here speaking to a
group of software companies,
all CEOs of these top
software companies.
You probably know
all these people.
And one of the CEOs offered
to drive me to the airport
after my talk, because
he wanted to figure out
how we could cascade
this research out
through his organization.
And so I got into
his really nice car
and put on my seat belt, and
he got in on the other side
and immediately started
talking to me about what
his company was experiencing,
all the change and stress.
And that bell was
going off in his car
because he hadn't
put on his seat belt
yet and just kept going off
and eventually got tired
and just stopped.
And I turned to
him and I was like,
you don't wear a seat belt?
And he said, no, I
listened to your talk.
I love your research.
I'm an optimist.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: I was like,
oh, you're an idiot.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: But I'd
love to work with you.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: Optimism is
great for a lot of things,
but it doesn't stop
cars from hitting us.
It doesn't stop reality
from impinging upon us.
And that's irrational optimism.
And there's books
and ideas out there
that if you're like, if
I just change my mindset,
everything will change for me.
And that's actually irrational.
Because if you
sugarcoat the present,
we make bad decisions
in the future.
And if we think that
reality won't impact us,
we don't make any
changes to that reality,
and it causes us to be blind
to injustices that are going on
in the world or to racism
or to weaknesses in our life
that we want to improve.
Irrational optimists
don't put on a seat belt
because they don't think
anything bad can happen
to them, and a pessimist
doesn't put on a seat belt
because they think they're
going to die anyway.
But a rational optimist, which
is what I'm hoping people
go for with this idea,
rational optimism
doesn't start with
rose-colored glasses.
It starts with a realistic
assessment of the present, both
the good and the bad,
but maintains the belief
that our behavior matters.
It's linked to our
social support networks.
I love that.
The rational optimism takes
a realistic assessment
of the present
first but maintains
the belief my behavior matters.
It's linked to the
people around me.
And that, I think, is where
we want to go with this.
I get people after
my talks who say,
I'm not an optimist
or a pessimist.
I'm just a realist
right now, which
usually means
they're a pessimist.
But what they're saying
is actually nonsensical,
because both optimists
and pessimists
can both be realists.
Realism's seeing the problems
in this world and in our work
and in our lives.
Optimism and pessimism is what
happens after the problem.
So you have to see reality.
You know that reality
has an impact.
But do I believe
that that problem is
permanent and pervasive,
it affects everything,
or it's local, it's one
part of your reality,
and that it's temporary?
This too will pass.
That's where we want
people to get to,
not to ignore the
reality but to realize
that they can change it.
So I love that quote
that you were talking
about that you grew up with,
because it really is about,
how do you take the world that
you have and move forward?
So thank you.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
AUDIENCE: I've heard the saying
you are the average of the five
people you associate
with the most.
SHAWN ACHOR: Wow.
AUDIENCE: And whether
it's five or six,
I don't think the
quantity really matters.
And the intent of
the question is
you grow with the
people around you.
And so I started to really
question my relationships
from high school to college and
now Google and moving forward.
Were these relationships
based-- they've changed so much,
and people that I
used to care about I
haven't talked to in so long.
And I'm progressing
forward in my career,
and I'm really only
associating with people--
I try to have genuine
conversations with everyone.
But then I realized
two years later
that, oh, I don't even talk to
this person I cared about so
much, just because he's not
a part of my career anymore.
Because it's such a
huge part in my life.
SHAWN ACHOR: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: And so
it's really tough
to see are all my
relationships that superficial
to the point of
helping me just kind of
be a more powerful
force in the world?
Because I think we all care
about changing the world
and having an impact,
and that's really hard
when you try to really
build relationships.
And when you say cut
people out of your life
that are bringing
you down, it may
be that they're in a stage
in which they need the most,
and you've just cut them out.
Sometimes I reflect on this,
and I go into a very dark place
very quickly.
SHAWN ACHOR: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: I'm pretty happy
guy, more or less than not.
But I think about
this stuff a lot,
and I was wondering
what your opinions are.
SHAWN ACHOR: Yeah.
Thank you for sharing that,
because I think about this lot
too because I find
the same thing.
It's less about my career.
It's more about who's in
my immediate vicinity.
I even saw it with my freshmen
then when I was a Proctor.
I'd be so close and
tight with my freshmen.
And then as soon as
they got moved off
to the River Houses or
the Quad, I was like, OK,
I've got my new friends,
the new freshmen
that came in this year.
And what I found was it was
so frustrating because I cared
so much about my family
members, these friends
that I had had in the past, but
they were outside of my sphere,
because we're so
used to interacting
with the people that are in
your sphere, which at work,
if you're focused on work, that
entire sphere might be here.
So of course the
people closest to you
might be the people that
are directly related
to that career.
And I make a little bit of fun
of cutting the negative people
out of our life,
because I actually
don't want people to do that.
I think it misses out on
how powerful we can actually
be in these relationships,
even if they're short-term.
Because at Yale they
found that if you
have three strangers
come into the room,
all with different emotions--
I get asked a lot,
who's more powerful,
the positive people in your
life and the negative people?
You might have a positive
team, but there's
this one negative guy
on the team that's
dragging the whole team down, or
one positive person that you're
talking about that's very calm
that gets everyone else to be
calm.
We can't answer that question,
because it's different
every time we test it.
Sometimes it's the
positive person.
Sometimes it's the
negative person.
What we found is it was
a different variable.
They found that the other
two people in the room
leave with an increased
likelihood of experiencing
the emotions of
the most verbally
and non-verbally expressive
person in the room.
So what that means is
verbally or non-verbally,
if I'm very expressive of my
pessimism or my negativity,
I'm changing that social script.
And what we found is social
influence in our lives
is defined by three
things, the strength
of our message, the immediacy,
how important that message is
to people, and the
number of sources
that are giving
that same message.
What we found is that if you're
wanting to try and create
a positive effect
upon other people,
you want to increase the
strength of that message, to be
more positive verbally
and non-verbally
in those relationships to try
and change those five or six
people that might be
in our average circle.
But also, you're trying
to increase the end.
Oftentimes when we think
about those negative people,
we should actually
not be going straight
for the negative person.
We should be increasing
the positivity
of the people in the middle that
we could tip towards positive
that help make that
person actually
see a social script
that's more positive.
But what's interesting, the
other part about your question,
is these strong ties versus
weak ties, which I actually
do a lot of research on.
Weak ties are actually
much more predictive
of your long-term success
than the strong ties are.
Happiness levels,
though, are related
to both, the breadth and
depth of your relationships.
So part of what
we find is people,
depending on your introversion
or your extroversion,
you can have lots of friends or
small friends, deep or broad,
and what we found is that
it really is how you see it,
how you see those interactions.
Do you see them as only
weak ties, in which case
they don't actually
provide as much meaning
to you, in which case
you don't actually
feel sustained by that
social support network?
It's what we see with
social media a lot of times.
When people follow people on
Twitter or on any social media
platform, if they
follow people they
don't know they get no return
on their investment of time
in terms of social connection.
But if they follow
people that they're
friends from high school
and they see that they just
had a kid or they just got
a job and they actually
do see them at some point or
they do interact with them,
they have a depth of
their social knowledge
that deepens that relationship
and causes more meaning.
So what I've been doing in
my life-- this sounds very
similar to what
you're experiencing--
is I try to reconnect with
some of those people in very
short bursts but
in meaningful ways.
And one of the habits
that I have people
do at these companies
is every day
when you get into work write
a two-minute email praising
or thanking or reconnecting
with one person.
That's it.
Two minutes maximum,
so it's super short.
It's two or three sentences.
Try it today.
Just connect with
one of those people
you feel like is outside
of that career sphere.
And if you do it for
three days, you'll
literally become addicted
to it, because you're
going to spend all day long
thinking about how amazing you
were for writing that email.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: But what happens
is 21 days later as you've
reconnected to those people,
your brain realizes, wow,
I have incredibly
robust social support.
I saw some of you this morning
that I hadn't seen from my time
at Harvard, and
it's so exciting.
I haven't seen you in so
long, and it's so exciting
to have those opportunities.
What we found is social
support is the greatest
predictor of long-term
happiness we have.
So instead of
fleeing from negative
or only investing in our sphere,
if we can find just small ways
to increase and deepen
that social connection,
we've found it's the greatest
predictor of happiness.
At Columbia, they
found that if I
know the collective IQ on a team
and the years of experience,
neither of those are
as predictive as how
tight the team feels, so
we know it's important.
But then the last part, my
favorite statistic right now,
which is actually by a guy
named Dr. House, which I think
is hilarious, he found
that the social connection
is as predictive of how long
you will live as obesity,
high blood pressure, or smoking.
We fight so hard
against the negative,
and we forget about how
powerful two minutes
of a positive
interaction could be.
So yeah, I feel the
exact same thing,
and I think it's how we
perceive those relationships
that, while they
might be temporary,
that doesn't take away the
meaning involved with them,
just as everything that
is temporary in life
is not destroyed of meaning.
This is from Buddhism, right?
While things are
temporary, that doesn't
mean that there's
not meaningful.
In fact, that can actually
increase the meaning
of those short times that
we have with those people.
CHADE-MENG TAN:
We're out of time,
so I just have one short
last question for you, Shawn.
What can we, Google, do for you?
SHAWN ACHOR: Oh.
You already did it for coming.
Thank you so much for coming.
I think the biggest
thing is help us
get this positive
research out there more.
Tal Ben-Shahar told me that he
had an adviser who said that
the average scientific journal
article is only read by seven
people total--
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: --which
is incredibly
depressing for a researcher
to hear, because I know that
also includes my mom.
[AUDIENCE LAUGHING]
SHAWN ACHOR: So
if there's any way
you can share this research.
I think the best way is
to tell people about it.
Tell people they're
not just their genes
or their environment.
But really the best
way is to show them.
Pick up a positive habit.
Get involved with
one of these programs
to create one of these
positive changes.
Because what we find
is that it ripples out
so much to effect other people.
Real quick story.
I was working with a CEO
of a fast food company.
He sold his company for
hundreds of millions of dollars
and had a breakdown.
He made millions of dollars.
But that night he went
on track with his wife
and start walking off some of
the weight that he had gained
and talking about things that
he was grateful for, doing
that positive habit.
It was so helpful that they
start doing it and telling
their kids that
they were doing it.
And they got a call from one
of their friend's parents
who said, did you hear what
happened at the summer party
for your daughter?
And they were like, oh, no.
Was there drinking or boys?
And they said, no, she got
everyone in her friend group
to sit around and
talk about the things
that they were grateful for
that were going on at school.
We can actually create a
different social script
for the world where people
don't wait for happiness off
in the future but actually
are creating it now
and actually are
tipping this world away
from negativity and
stress to a world that
believes this behavior matters
and can see ways of changing
this reality into a better
reality for all of us,
which is why I get excited.
CHADE-MENG TAN: Thank you.
SHAWN ACHOR: So thank you.
Thank you so much.
CHADE-MENG TAN: Thank you.
[AUDIENCE APPLAUDING]
CHADE-MENG TAN: Thank you.
