Shawn Achor – “The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance”

Aspirant World   
September 8th, 2011

Credit: Jesus Solana/WikiMedia

Shawn Achor is the winner of over a dozen distinguished teaching awards at Harvard University, where he delivered lectures on positive psychology in the most popular class at Harvard.

His research and lectures on happiness and human potential have received attention in The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, as well as on NPR and CNN Radio, and he travels around the United States and Europe giving talks on positive psychology to Fortune 500 corporations, schools, and non-profit organizations.

Achor graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with a BA in English and Religion and earned a Masters degree from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics.

Now he is the CEO of Aspirant, a Cambridge-based consulting firm which researches positive outliers-people who are well above average-to understand where human potential, success and happiness intersect. Based on his research and 12 years of experience at Harvard, he clearly and humorously describes to organizations how to increase happiness and meaning, raise success rates and profitability, and create positive transformations that ripple into more successful cultures.

In Shawn’s TEDxBloomington presentation, he says that most modern research focuses on the average, but that “if we focus on the average, we will remain merely average.” He wants to study the positive outliers, and learn how not only to bring people up to the average, but to move the entire average up.

[Source: Aspirant World]

(+6 rating)

 Loading ...

You might also enjoy:

• The Roommate Revolution: Why Living Alone is Overrated
• Massachusetts, Farm to School Project
• Space for Happiness in Bristol, England
• Three Ashoka Fellows Win Top Awards for Social Innovation
• Graduates Get a Crash Course in Sharing

2 Responses to “Shawn Achor – “The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance””

• Jason says:

  September 13, 2011 at 1:43 pm

  Was it Sam Walmart who said to the effect of “focus on the exception and we will become exceptional”?

  Reply