The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance by Shawn Achor

The highly entertaining Shawn Achor speaks about how happiness can improve our ability to create, produce and perform in school, business, and life. Achor is in the field of Positive Psychology and in within this talk he emphasizes that we can alter our brain patterns.

While Achors talk is very motivating and humorous he offers minimal ways in which to achieve happiness, however, he offers a good base. He gives us just a taste of a concept would require more exploration. The link to his website is at the end of this post.


 The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance by Shawn Achor

Per Youtube Description:

Shawn Achor is the winner of over a dozen distinguished teaching awards at Harvard University, where he delivered lectures on positive psychology in the most popular class at Harvard.

His research and lectures on happiness and human potential have received attention in The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR and CNN Radio, and he travels around the United States and Europe giving talks on positive psychology to Fortune 500 corporations, schools, and non-profit organizations.

Achor graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a BA in English and Religion and earned a Masters degree from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics.

Now he is the CEO of Aspirant, a Cambridge-based consulting firm which researches positive outliers-people who are well above average-to understand where human potential, success and happiness intersect. Based on his research and 12 years of experience at Harvard, he clearly and humorously describes to organizations how to increase happiness and meaning, raise success rates and profitability, and create positive transformations that ripple into more successful cultures.

In Shawn's TEDxBloomington presentation, he says that most modern research focuses on the average, but that "if we focus on the average, we will remain merely average." He wants to study the positive outliers, and learn how not only to bring people up to the average, but to move the entire average up.

To learn more, visit the official Shawn Achor website.
To learn more about TED talks visit the official TED website.