The secret to success: Be happy!

Apparently the secret to being successful is to be happy.

I recently made a suggestion at work to meet up with some colleagues at lunch time to watch a TED talk and discuss how it applied to us, our jobs, our organisation, etc. Today was our first catch-up and together we watched the below talk by Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage.

Shawn Achor: The happy secret to better work [TED]

I had already watched the talk once and found Shawn’s comedic storytelling highly engaging. Watching it a second time, I was able to better focus on his message. To me, it was pretty simple: Success doesn’t lead to happiness, happiness leads to success.

How often do we find that, no matter how good we are at something, we still wake up dreading it? If you’re not doing something you love, something that makes you happy, why are you doing it? This has implications for how to motivate people: let them do something that makes them happy!

It’s more than just doing things that make you happy, though. Achor suggests that a significant proportion of your happiness is internal. Even if you’re not doing something you love, you’ll still be more successful if you’re a happy person. So how do we become happier?

Don’t worry, be happy!

Achor suggests a number of actions that you can take to be happier. The one that really struck a chord with a number of my colleagues was having gratitude and it seems that to be more grateful, like many things in life, practice makes perfect. Emmons & McCullough, in an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2003, found that gratitude exercises leads to emotional, physical or interpersonal benefits. Emmons later published a book Thanks!: How Practicing Gratitude Can Make You Happier.

A few of us made the decision to find three new things to be grateful for everyday for 21 days. I am going to use 21habit.com to help track how I go. I found it pretty easy on day 1, I hope that it becomes a habit, that my happiness increases (not that I was unhappy by any means) and that this helps me be more successful!

So, do you want to be successful? If so, how happy are you?