What's the Easiest Path to Happiness?

Be very, very lucky. After you've achieved that, this book could help a little.

Shawn Achor wants you to know he went to Harvard. Talking about attending Harvard can be a tricky thing – if it isn't done delicately it can come off as pretentious. Achor isn't especially worried about this, apparently; the first sentence of chapter 1 in The Happiness Advantage reads: "I applied to Harvard on a dare." After studying there, and staying on afterward in various capacities, he founded a small consulting firm that focused on teaching managers how to develop a happy work-force, right in time for the 2008 financial crisis. To read his book, it looks like he has lead a charmed life, surrounded by people who have the talent or the luck to land on the top of the heap. If adversity leads to insight, one wonders, then is someone who's lead such a blessed life in any position to be giving advice to the rest of us?

This isn't to say that he hasn't had any hard times. He details an afternoon in the psychology lab, as the subject of an experiment he volunteered for, for a few extra dollars. As part of the study he was knocked down onto a lightly padded surface several hundred times. It worked out for the best, though – in the end he received ten times the amount of money he was expecting.

The lesson he takes from this is about the value of picking yourself up and trying again. I suppose that's easier if your adversities turn out not to actually be adverse. The lesson I took from this story is that it must be nice to participate in experiments at such a well-funded institution.

The picture he paints of himself is endlessly optimistic, and the point he wants to make is, basically, look on the bright side and things will work out for the best.

And to some extent, he's right. At least, if we flip it around it's true: expecting to fail is no way to find happiness. But failing because we expect to fail is different from succeeding because we expect to succeed.

The Good

He also explores some interesting notions that go along with this, and provides some scientific evidence to support his claims. Achor offers some clever suggestions for making small-scale life improvements. Since people are prone to follow the path of least resistance, he suggests putting up barriers between yourself and time-wasting activities (things like making it harder to get into Facebook, or the old put-the-cookies-on-the-highest-shelf trick) and bring down the mental obstacles that keep you from, for example, getting to the gym. He suggests making all your workout decisions ahead of time – apparently there was a period during which he slept in his gym clothes so he wouldn't have to overcome the barrier posed by getting dressed for his workout. If it works, it works.

On the Other Hand

Like many other Positive Psychology books, the science isn't always good and the evidence isn't always clear. Achor has a habit of accepting experimental results at face value, without considering other possible interpretations of the results or looking in to their validity. This is fair; he doesn't present himself as a psychologist. But the reader should be wary of overstatements and the possibility of misinterpretation.

The Shawn Achor I got to know reading this book – who may be very different from the one rebinging Lost in his bathrobe and slippies at home in the evenings – feels very two-dimensional to me. As he sees it, there are simple solutions for all of life's problems. There is nothing positivity can't fix. So he overstates his case. Who knows? Maybe he really has had the blessed life his anecdotes suggest. For people fortunate enough live in his world, his simple, quick-fix solutions should do the trick. And for the rest of us? Not so much.

The Deeper Read

Achor's shallowness, I think, comes from the fact that he is trying to play to two different audiences. Advice that is good for upper-level managers of white collar workers he consults with isn't necessarily good for the broader reading audience he is trying to reach with this mass-market book. The successful managers he consults with live in a professional world that generally treats them pretty well. Achor's goal is to help them make that limited work-space better. His top-down advice could be helpful in that context. He treats everyone as though they managed their own worlds, and when he does that, Achor's optimistic advice falls flat.

It is possible to adopt a positive mindset as completely as he suggests, but the possibility forces me (as a member of the reading public and not a manager) to ask a couple of questions:

What do I do when optimism doesn't help? and
How much of my personality would I have to sacrifice if I were to become that sort of endlessly optimistic person?

When Optimism Should Fail

Optimism isn't always the solution. At times, in fact, it can be a problem. One of the frequent criticisms of Positive Psychology holds true for The Happiness Advantage: there are times when circumstances prevent people from succeeding. Achor's book is blind to this fact, and as a result, there are a number of moments that land hard and hurt the head. One of the first things I noticed about the book – aside from the frequent references to Harvard – is the fact that he uses "success" and "productivity" interchangeably. They're not the same, of course. Being productive at work involves being good at what you do. Being successful involves being recognized for it. In the ideal world, hard work and ability are rewarded. This, apparently, is how things work in Achor's world, but for many of us, the idea of being given credit for our work, to say nothing of moving up as a result of it, is an iffy proposition.

That jangles my nerves a little bit, but it goes on to become problematic when he begins to attribute failure to a bad attitude. He writes, "[L]earned helplessness is endemic in inner city schools, prisons, and elsewhere. When people don't believe there is a way up, they have virtually no choice to stay down as they are." (p. 118) Does he honestly think that a wide-spread attitude adjustment would eradicate the social problems the US faces? Is curing learned helplessness the answer to our big problems, or is it curing the problems that teach people to feel helpless? If he really thinks this, he misunderstands some very important points. Some time away from the ivory tower and Wall Street conference rooms might help him connect to a wider range of American experiences.

How Much Should Happiness Cost?

And then there's another question: what do you sacrifice to become optimistic? Some thinkers on the topic divide positive feelings into three categories: pleasure, well-being, and meaning. Achor's book focuses on developing a sense of well-being. Feel good and you will succeed, he argues. Having well-being leads to more well-being.

But is it meaningful? Once again, for high-level managers, when they are interested in their work environments, creating a sense of well-being in their employees is meaningful. But for the rest of us, there can be dignity in acknowledging the fact that good work isn't well-measured by recognition. And, in the bigger picture, there is value in seeing it when we are fighting good fights. Being aware of the basic issues that hold people back isn't a recipe for mediocrity as Achor suggests; it is a necessary step toward solving them. In Achor's world, the good fight is not against our problems themselves, but against our recognition that they are problems. In his prescription, well-being is more important than meaning in life. If we have to choose between happiness and insight into the workings of the world – and as Achor lays it out, at times it must be an either-or choice – in his world, happiness always wins.

In his advice to managers, however, there is one spark of insight that shines through: his use of the research is much better and clearer when he discusses – again and again – the idea that good relationships are essential for happiness both at work and away from it, and encourages his managers to create environments in which workers can develop this most important aspect of their lives.

The Big Picture

He deserves credit for that. At the same time, I have to wonder: how did the professional world get to the point where managers need Achor to tell them that people need friends and family to thrive? How did we get here?

For the most part, Achor's advice isn't bad, but, aside from encouraging work-place relationships, it isn't especially good, either. His ideas provide reasonable Band-Aids for the skinned knees and paper cuts life deals out, but when it comes to the times we have to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, he is silent.

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The Happiness Advantage, by Sean Achor

The Happiness Advantage, by Shawn Achor