肖恩-阿克爾談幸福是一種競爭優勢 (Shawn Achor on happiness as a competitive advantage)

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SHAWN ACHOR: When I first went off to college
to start collecting debts, my father was buoyed by the idea
that he knew I would just come back with a high quality job.
I'd come back and be a doctor or a lawyer or a banker.
And when I came back from college and told them,
Dad, I want to study the science of happiness, he sat me down.
And he said, Sean, I just want to let
you know that the average scientific journal article is
only read on average by seven people total, which
is incredibly depressing research-- statistic for us
researchers to hear.
Because we know that that statistic also
includes our moms.
So we're down to six people that read
these studies, which is a tragedy.
Because I believe that research is
the key to bridging the gaps that we're hearing about what
we've been learning about in terms of theory
and what we've been seeing applied in practice.
My very first talk was out at a large Swiss bank
at the beginning of the banking class.
And when I was introduced, I was introduced by a senior level
leader there who was asked by HR to introduce me.
And he did not want to do so.
And instead of reading my bio, he
said, well, we don't have bonuses for everyone,
but here's a talk on happiness from a guy from America.
You can imagine the cold response as the tech team
unfortunately in the back turned on the "Don't Worry, Be Happy"
theme music as I walked up from the back of the room.
But within 10 minutes of talking to them,
as I start talking about research that was directly
aimed at how we can actually get people to believe
that their behavior matters again, to restart forward
progress in the midst of a challenge,
you could see people start to pick up their pens
and start to take notes that they
wanted to bring back to their teams.
Seven years later, earlier this year,
I was out at the Pentagon.
I was invited to give a talk there on happiness.
And I was brought into a room full of senior level leaders--
people that were leaders of NATO forces in Afghanistan and Iraq,
who were Special Forces.
And I did the bravest thing I think I've ever done.
I started a talk at the Pentagon with a story
about a unicorn, which if you see my TED Talk,
you know what I'm talking about.
But afterwards, one of the senior leaders came up to me
and said, Sean, 10 years ago, we could not
have had a talk on happiness at the Pentagon.
And I think he's right.
That's where I want to start my talk today.
Because I believe we're at the midst of twin revolutions.
Of course, we're sitting in the heart
of the technological revolution that we already know about.
But we're also realizing that while technology can increase
productivity, we're also finding that we
can't increase the amount of workload and stress
and strain on the same individual
and still hope to maintain those same levels of productivity
and profitability.
The second realization and revolution
will be the idea that we can increase productivity
by increasing optimal human flourishing.
And that's what I want to talk about today
about that research.
We were asked to talk about one thing that
was-- they were going to put it out there
that there was going to start debate.
And what I would like argue is that you are not just
your genes and your environment-- that
scientifically, happiness can be a choice.
But it's a choice that we can influence
through our organizations.
And when we do so, it becomes the greatest
competitive advantage in the modern economy.
This is my third time out speaking at Google.
One of the times I came here was with Ming Tan
to do a Google Talk.
And while I was talking to them, I
started noticing all these comparisons
between what we saw at Google and what
I was seeing during my 12 years at Harvard.
For example, when I talk to my friends from Waco, Texas
where I grow up about going off to Harvard,
they say, why would you study happiness there?
They seem to have everything-- opportunities, resources,
wealth, and successes.
And when I was at Google, I was talking to people
and I asked them if they walked around
in a constant state of ecstasy.
And one of the women in the accounting department
said with-- sheepishly-- that she actually
felt very frustrated sometimes on Fridays because she would
see the line for the free sushi and it was way too long.
How is she expected to be productive
when the line is that long?
I ask you.
But what I started realizing what--
it wasn't about the external world
that causes people to become happier.
And that's not what causes Google
to be so successful as Lazlo was mentioning earlier.
What I want to talk about is what I was seeing at Harvard.
One of the very first studies I did
was a study of 1600 Harvard students.
I was looking to see, can you predict,
in a population that's very intelligent, very successful,
very creative, who will rise to the top in terms of levels
of happiness and success while they're there?
I looked at everything.
We asked their familial income, their SAT scores.
We looked at their GPA.
We looked at a number of clubs that they were involved in.
We found out their number of romantic relationships, which
we found at Harvard was, on average, less than one
per Harvard student, which is why many people come out
to Stanford.
And we found it was 0.5 sexual partners per Harvard student,
which I only mention because I still
have no idea what that statistic even means.
We were always taught to round up.
But 0.5 sexual partners with the equivalent of second base.
And it was useless information to us.
But imagine a student who, ever since they were a one-year-old,
was placed into a crib wearing a onesie that you can buy
at the bookstore that says, bound for Harvard,
and maybe a cute little Yale had in case something terrible
happened.
And ever since they were in pre-K school
which they got into four years before they were conceived,
they were the top 1% of their class--
junior high, high school, standardized test, top 1%.
They walk into Harvard and they have a terrible realization,
one that many people when they come to Google have as well.
They suddenly realize that 50% of them are now below average.
To put it more poignantly, when I talk to these students,
I said it seems based on my research that 99% of you
will not graduate in the top 1%, which they don't find
that funny either.
But the reason that's interesting
is they've decided to pin their levels of happiness
on their future success which is related to something small,
like grades, which if you know the statistics on grades,
I can roll a pair of dice and that's
equally predictive of your future job income
as your college GPA actually is.
But they consign 99% to unhappiness.
And the top 1% when we study them
is actually not that happy either.
The system is broken.
It's based upon a flawed system of happiness and success--
a formula for it which is the heart of my research.
What I do is I study what I believe
to be one of the fundamental problems that's
causing us to limit both our happiness and success
with an organization.
And it's a formula we get there.
And it's the way that we manage, the way that we parent,
and it's the way that we do self-development.
Most people follow the formula, which is if you work harder,
you're going to be more successful.
As soon as you achieve these goals,
think how happy you're going to be.
Think how often we do that.
Soon as I finish this project, I'll be happier.
Soon as I finish this presentation,
then I'm going to feel happier.
As soon as I finish all this travel, then I'll feel happier.
As soon as I get into the right school, I'll feel happier.
Soon as I get the right job, I'll feel happier.
But what we notice is that formula
which undergirds most of our parenting styles
in organizations is scientifically broken
and backwards for two reasons.
The first reason is, every time your brain has had a success
in the past, what have you done?
You've change the goal post of what success
looked like almost immediately.
You got good grades in school?
Don't get excited yet.
You don't even have a job.
You get a job.
That's great, you have a job.
But now you have to hit your sales target.
Well, you hit your sales target.
That's great.
But we're going to raise your sales
target for the next quarter, right?
So in each moment, we want to see sales rise.
We want to see growth and improvement.
We want to see grades improve.
That's not the problem.
The problem is where happiness lies
in the formula for our managing our organizations
and for ourselves.
What we've found is that if happiness
is on the opposite side of success,
you've pushed it over the cognitive horizon.
Your brain never quite gets there
because it's a moving target.
But flip around the formula.
If you cause people to invest in their social support networks,
deepen their social support networks,
raise their levels of optimism, and change the way that they
view stress from a threat to a challenge,
it turns out every single business and educational
outcome we know how to test for rises dramatically.
We find that productivity rises 31%
when people move from a neutral state to a positive state.
We find that sales rise by 37% cross industry.
We found similar to the research you've
found in the great book "Give and Take" by Adam Grant,
we know that if you provide social support at work,
you're 40% more likely to receive a promotion
over the next two year period of time.
We know that you live longer.
Your symptoms are less acute.
We find that you stay at organizations even longer.
All of that information is great.
But the problem is that if you try
to raise your levels of success rate for the rest of your life
and you're successful at that, your happiness levels flatline.
They don't move.
Flip around the formula, if we find
some way of investing in our engagement levels at work,
if you've read Dan Ping's fabulous book "Drive",
if you've been looking at ways to deepen social connection,
if we could change the way we view stress,
suddenly a different picture emerges.
That's what I wanted to talk to you about.
Because what works really well in the laboratory
sometimes doesn't work out in the messiness of life.
So since I've spent my time at Harvard,
I left in the middle of the banking crisis
to try and figure out how we could apply this research out
within the real world.
And a lot of the work I'm going to talk about
is at organizations.
But I've also traveled to 51 countries working with farmers
in Zimbabwe that lost their land, working
with children at St. Jude Children's Hospital trying
to find out from some of the doctors
there why it is that four-year-old children
with terminal cancer are more likely to tell
their parents everything's going to be OK then the reverse.
Why is there access to resilience at childhood
that we lose sometimes in adulthood?
And how do we import that to soldiers coming back
from combat services?
That's not what we're going to get to talk about today.
What I wanted to talk about is some of the ways
we've seen these organizations be able to thrive.
We do two things.
One of the things to do it do is if you've
read Charles Duhigg's fantastic book "The Power of Habit",
you know how important habits can be.
And over the past seven years, what
I've been doing is I've been looking to find out,
are there habits that take less than two minutes a day that
are akin to brushing your teeth that if you did them up
for a period of 21 days in a row that you could trump your genes
and even up to eight decades of experience?
And that's exactly what we found.
We found small little habits-- something simple,
as Martin Seligman found, where you write three things that you
knew that you were grateful for each day for 21 days in a row
can actually move people that are continually testing
as pessimists at an organization to testing as
low to moderate level optimists and that the pattern exists
for even six months.
One of the things I've found that I love
is if you write a two minute email praising or thanking
one person you know, it turns out if you do that every day
for a different person for 21 days,
if you do it for the next three days
writing to somebody, a two minute email praising them
or thanking them, you're going to get fully addicted to it.
Because you're going to spend all day long thinking
about how amazing you were for writing that in the morning.
And you get these great emails back
because they don't know about the two minute rule.
So they keep writing how great you are.
And you're like, yep, this is-- all this is true.
But 21 days later, when we ask about your social connection,
you realize you have incredibly deep social connection.
The breadth, depth, and meaning in your social relationships
has increased dramatically.
We found that social connection is not only
the greatest predictor of happiness
with inside organizations, but we also
found that social connection is as predictive of how long all
of you will end up living as obesity, high blood
pressure, or smoking.
We sure fight hard against the negative
and we forget to tell people how powerful the positive can be.
With my last minute, what I wanted to do
is to tell you about what we're doing with organizations.
We've seen these fantastic organizations take these ideas
and run with them.
In fact, Nationwide Insurance, for example--
I'm working with the Nationwide Sales Academy
where when people are onboarded to become a sales leader there,
they're taught that the new social script is when you come
into the organization, it's not that once you hit your sales
then you're going to feel happier,
but that happiness and optimism and social connection
are exactly what's going to fuel the sales.
So when we talk about this later on, it's not a surprise.
That's what causes people to be successful
here. one of the groups we were working with that has been led
by Gary Baker actually went through one
of the positive psychology training programs.
We found, as I was talking to Larry from Gallup
earlier this morning, we founded that their Gallup scores
actually improve dramatically in terms
of their engagement with just a very short positive psychology
intervention.
But their revenues have moved from 350 million to 950 million
over the past year and that it's actually--
they think it'll happen again this coming year.
We're finding at KPMG, we did a three hour intervention
with them in December, 2008, right before the busiest tax
season in history.
Four months later during the busiest tax season in history,
in April, we compare them to a control group
that got a technical training.
And what we found is exactly what Gallup found.
Only 25% of your successes over the next five years
are predicted based on your intelligence
and technical skills which is how we hire, educate,
and train.
75% of your successes will be based
upon the belief that your behavior matters,
your social connections, and the way that we
perceive the stress coming in.
And the final thing I want to mention
is the work we were doing at UBS.
Alliah Krum and Peter Salovey from Yale University-- Allie's
now out in Stanford-- and I went into UBS.
And we found that most of the stress management programs
that we put people through was actually causing people
to get sicker.
Because we tell people that if you
go to stress management program as,
companies make you more stress, we say,
do you know stress is related to the 10 leading causes of death
and disease in the United States?
Did you know stress was found by the World Health Organization
to be the number one killer?
Do you know that stress is catabolic?
It tears down every organ in the human body.
After that, what do you feel?
Stress-- you're like, stop emailing me so much!
You're destroying every organ in my body!
Which I think would make a great away message while you're here.
But what I think is fascinating is all
that information is true.
But there's equally true information
that shows that stress-- not good stress,
I'm talking about high levels of negative stress-- actually
causes your immune system to turn onto its highest
possible level, cognitive function to improve,
memory to deepen.
It turns out our social bonds deepen
to its highest possible level, which
is why when we go through-- when the military onboards people,
they don't put them through a beach vacation.
They onboard them with boot camp.
And that creates these meaningful narratives
that people talk about for their entire rest of their career.
What we did is we showed two two-minute videos
to these individuals in the middle of the banking crisis--
stress is enhancing, stress is debilitating.
Here's how you fight it, here's how you embrace it.
Six weeks later, equal levels of stress.
But the group that saw stress as a challenge instead
of as a threat had a 23% drop in their health related symptoms.
Stress is inevitable, but its effects upon us are not.
And I believe that all this research comes down
to these three conclusions.
Scientifically, happiness can be a choice.
You don't have to just be your genes and your environment,
and we can actually influence it.
The second one is that happiness spreads.
When we choose to do this, it actually
cascades to other people, changing the social script.
And finally, happiness is an advantage.
In fact, what I would argue is that because it improves
every single business and educational outcome we know,
I believe that happiness, optimism, social connection
are the greatest competitive advantages
in the modern economy.
And all it takes is taking this research that's
only read on average by seven people total
and just bringing it to life.
So thank you so much opportunity to share this research.