「我们相信工作会带来幸福快乐，但是能不能反过来想呢？」其实，每个人幸福的程度可以由身处的外在环境来预测，可是事实是就算能够知道你所处的外在环境，也只能预测你10%的长期幸福程度，另外的90%不能以外在环境预测的部分，是取决于你的脑子如何看待这个环境。 Whatever it is, instead of deleting you, what I want to do is study you. Because maybe we can glean information -- not just how to move people up to the average, but how we can move the entire average up in our companies and schools worldwide.The reason this graph is important to me is, when I turn on the news, it seems like the majority of the information is not positive, in fact it"s negative. Most of it"s about murder, corruption, diseases, natural disasters. And very quickly, my brain starts to think that"s the accurate ratio of negative to positive in the world. What that"s doing is creating something called the medical school syndrome -- which, if you know people who"ve been to medical school, during the first year of medical training, as you read through a list of all the symptoms and diseases that could happen, suddenly you realize you have all of them.I have a brother in-law named Bobo -- which is a whole other story. Bobo married Amy the unicorn. Bobo called me on the phone from Yale Medical School, and Bobo said, "Shawn, I have leprosy." (Laughter) Which, even at Yale, is extraordinarily rare. But I had no idea how to console poor Bobo because he had just gotten over an entire week of menopause.(Laughter)See what we"re finding is it"s not necessarily the reality that shapes us, but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality. And if we can change the lens, not only can we change your happiness, we can change every single educational and business outcome at the same time.When I applied to Harvard, I applied on a dare. I didn"t expect to get in, and my family had no money for college. When I got a military scholarship two weeks later, they allowed me to go. Suddenly, something that wasn"t even a possibility became a reality. When I went there, I assumed everyone else would see it as a privilege as well, that they"d be excited to be there. Even if you"re in a classroom full of people smarter than you, you"d be happy just to be in that classroom, which is what I felt. But what I found there is, while some people experience that, when I graduated after my four years and then spent the next eight years living in the dorms with the students -- Harvard asked me to; I wasn"t that guy. (Laughter) I was an officer of Harvard to counsel students through the difficult four years. And what I found in my research and my teaching is that these students, no matter how happy they were with their original success of getting into the school, two weeks later their brains were focused, not on the privilege of being there, nor on their philosophy or their physics. Their brain was focused on the competition, the workload, the hassles, the stresses, the complaints.When I first went in there, I walked into the freshmen dining hall, which is where my friends from Waco, Texas, which is where I grew up -- I know some of you have heard of it. When they"d come to visit me, they"d look around, they"d say, "This freshman dining hall looks like something out of Hogwart"s from the movie "Harry Potter," which it does. This is Hogwart"s from the movie "Harry Potter" and that"s Harvard. And when they see this, they say, "Shawn, why do you waste your time studying happiness at Harvard?"Embedded within that question is the key to understanding the science of happiness. Because what that question assumes is that our external world is predictive of our happiness levels, when in reality, if I know everything about your external world, I can only predict 10 percent of your long-term happiness. 90 percent of your long-term happiness is predicted not by the external world, but by the way your brain processes the world. And if we change it, if we change our formula for happiness and success, what we can do is change the way that we can then affect reality. What we found is that only 25 percent of job successes are predicted by I.Q. 75 percent of job successes are predicted by your optimism levels, your social support and your ability to see stress as a challenge instead of as a threat.I talked to a boarding school up in New England, probably the most prestigious boarding school, and they said, "We already know that. So every year, instead of just teaching our students, we also have a wellness week. And we"re so excited. Monday night we have the world"s leading expert coming in to speak about adolescent depression. Tuesday night it"s school violence and bullying. Wednesday night is eating disorders. Thursday night is elicit drug use. And Friday night we"re trying to decide between risky sex or happiness." (Laughter) I said, "That"s most people"s Friday nights." (Laughter) (Applause) Which I"m glad you liked, but they did not like that at all. Silence on the phone. And into the silence, I said, "I"d be happy to speak at your school, but just so you know, that"s not a wellness week, that"s a sickness week. What you"ve done is you"ve outlined all the negative things that can happen, but not talked about the positive."The absence of disease is not health. Here"s how we get to health: We need to reverse the formula for happiness and success. In the last three years, I"ve traveled to 45 different countries, working with schools and companies in the midst of an economic downturn. And what I found is that most companies and schools follow a formula for success, which is this: If I work harder, I"ll be more successful. And if I"m more successful, then I"ll be happier. That undergirds most of our parenting styles, our managing styles, the way that we motivate our behavior.And the problem is it"s scientifically broken and backwards for two reasons. First, every time your brain has a success, you just changed the goalpost of what success looked like. You got good grades, now you have to get better grades, you got into a good school and after you get into a better school, you got a good job, now you have to get a better job, you hit your sales target, we"re going to change your sales target. And if happiness is on the opposite side of success, your brain never gets there. What we"ve done is we"ve pushed happiness over the cognitive horizon as a society. And that"s because we think we have to be successful, then we"ll be happier.But the real problem is our brains work in the opposite order. If you can raise somebody"s level of positivity in the present, then their brain experiences what we now call a happiness advantage, which is your brain at positive performs significantly better than it does at negative, neutral or stressed. Your intelligence rises, your creativity rises, your energy levels rise. In fact, what we"ve found is that every single business outcome improves. Your brain at positive is 31 percent more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. You"re 37 percent better at sales. Doctors are 19 percent faster, more accurate at coming up with the correct diagnosis when positive instead of negative, neutral or stressed. Which means we can reverse the formula. If we can find a way of becoming positive in the present, then our brains work even more successfully as we"re able to work harder, faster and more intelligently.What we need to be able to do is to reverse this formula so we can start to see what our brains are actually capable of. Because dopamine, which floods into your system when you"re positive, has two functions. Not only does it make you happier, it turns on all of the learning centers in your brain allowing you to adapt to the world in a different way.We"ve found that there are ways that you can train your brain to be able to become more positive. In just a two-minute span of time done for 21 days in a row, we can actually rewire your brain, allowing your brain to actually work more optimistically and more successfully. We"ve done these things in research now in every single company that I"ve worked with, getting them to write down three new things that they"re grateful for for 21 days in a row, three new things each day. And at the end of that, their brain starts to retain a pattern of scanning the world, not for the negative, but for the positive first.Journaling about one positive experience you"ve had over the past 24 hours allows your brain to relive it. Exercise teaches your brain that your behavior matters. We find that meditation allows your brain to get over the cultural ADHD that we"ve been creating by trying to do multiple tasks at once and allows our brains to focus on the task at hand. And finally, random acts of kindness are conscious acts of kindness. We get people, when they open up their inbox, to write one positive email praising or thanking somebody in their social support network.And by doing these activities and by training your brain just like we train our bodies, what we"ve found is we can reverse the formula for happiness and success, and in doing so, not only create ripples of positivity, but create a real revolution.Thank you very much.(Applause)4. Shawn Achor: The Happy Secret to Better Work5. Arianna Huffington: How to Succeed?
