This year at OCSA, faculty and staff have been offered a new resource to aid in team building and professional development: The Happiness Advantage. A positive psychology book, written by Shawn Achor, The Happiness Advantage focuses on the power of positive thinking, and motivates readers to focus on mindfulness and happiness first, as opposed to hoping that being productive will help one be happy.
The book uses seven principles to teach its reader about placing happiness first and then using it as a motivator to chase your goals. It follows the thought that instead of doing things like work or school to attain joy from accomplishments within it, people should chase their joy first in order to stay motivated in tasks to do with school or work. Achor’s website summarizes this, “We’ve been taught that if we work hard, we will be successful, and then we’ll be happy. If we can just find that great job, get a raise, and lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology have shown that this formula is actually backward: happiness fuels success, not the other way around.”
Shawn Achor is a Harvard graduate with a Bachelor of Arts and also a Master of Arts from Harvard Divinity School. He also worked at the college for an extended amount of time, even being one of the teaching assistants for Tal Ben-Shahar’s popular course, “Happiness.” Outside of that, he is a public speaker, and in that area is most well-known for his TEDx speech “The Happy Secret to Better Work,” which is amongst TED’s top 25 most popular TED Talks, currently sitting at over 20 million views.
The reviews of the book are mostly positive, with it currently presenting a 4.1 star rating on Goodreads. Most positive reviews like the content and say that the tips and psychological concepts in the book are actually helpful. Most positive reviewers seem to have watched the TED Talk beforehand. For example, one such reviewer wrote: “Ever since I first saw Shawn Achor’s unforgettable TED talk, I was obsessed with this message of positive psychology. This book has been on my TBR for a long time and finally I decided to get the audiobook and listen to the author read it himself (10/10 recommend btw!)” I loved every insightful, entertaining, and inspiring page of this book.” While most negative reviews dislike the author’s tone, saying it feels performative, like an infomercial, or overly sure of himself, one reviewer even saying: “The author’s writing style and presentation of this material is brutal, straight out of an infomercial. Everyone is an “expert”. The author has personally advised and guided every leader in the free world. Everything he’s presenting is good because it’s science (Science!).” The majority of reviews, however, rate the book four stars or above.
While reading and attending chats surrounding Achor’s work are voluntary, Principal Neal has shown his support for the work and shared that throughout the year staff can expect to find some of the exercises shared in the hopes of keeping mindfulness as a focus. If wellbeing and mindfulness become core concepts at schools, we might see happier staff and students, along with a better resolvent of issues; however, if the intended effect is realized, it’s too early to tell.
