115 Quotes by Shawn Achor

When a manager openly expresses his faith in an employee’s skill, he doesn’t just improve mood and motivation; he actually improves their likelihood of succeeding.

Look around at the people in your office, on the subway, sitting across from you at the cafe. Have you ever wondered if the world you see is the same one they see?

It’s hard to find happiness after success if the goalposts of success keep changing.

This is why Sonja Lyubomirsky, a leader in the scientific study of well-being, has written that she prefers the phrase “creation or construction of happiness” to the more popular “pursuit,” since “research shows that it’s in our power to fashion it for ourselves.”13.

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.

Most people keep waiting on happiness, putting off happiness until they’re successful or until they achieve some goal, which means we limit both happiness and success. That formula doesn’t work.

Happiness is actually an individual choice, even in the midst of negative circumstances. It’s not something our employers can give to us, though they can limit and influence that choice.

As we got more interested in time management and productivity, we lost the individual, and with that individual loss, we lost happiness as well. So I think the world has actually been malnourished as we’ve focused so much on productivity and ignored happiness and meaning to our own detriment.

Perhaps the most accurate term for happiness, then, is the one Aristotle used: eudaimonia, which translates not directly to “happiness” but to “human flourishing.