Success comes from being happy first
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“Look inward—the loving begins with you”
"The absence of illness does not equate to health". This is a TED Talk I recently discovered and is one of the most hilarious and thought provoking talks I have ever come across. Shawn Achor is a psychologist at Harvard and his research has led to a few insights, which I think all of us can embrace or at least consider.
I'll let you watch it for yourself - just be aware it's one of those TED Talks where you'll be sitting there smiling or laughing out loud to yourself. So if you're on a bus/train or in the office, just embrace the emotion of joy and laughter, because that will make you more successful. The key takeaways for me were:
In the office, in schools, and life in general, people tend to manage you to the "average". Why? Because statistically, that is easier. If you're on the average mean, you're aligned with the masses and therefore for teachers, managers, researchers, if they focus on the average, they've addressed the needs of the masses. Anybody who is above the mean (or below the mean) are statistical nuisances that we should ignore.
However, all of us have inherent preferences, tendencies, and skills, which means we will be above the statistical average in different scenarios. Instead of trying to conform to the norm, why not embrace your inner weirdo. If you align it to the goals of the group, it'll make you more confident, make you stand out, and given it is your inherent skill, you'll likely be more successful. And after all, nobody successful has ever done so by conforming to the norm.
High performers tend to think that happiness if on the other side of success. If we achieve this goal or that goal, then we can be happy. For example, if I become the CEO, I will be happy, or if I can earn $500k a year, then I will be happy. But that's not how our brains are constructed. If we're not happy (or worse depressed) then we can't utilise the full potential of our brain. We impose all these limitations on ourselves and we let others dictate what we should do. This makes achieving the our goals even more difficult, which makes us even more unhappy.
Therefore, we should reverse the thinking. We should aim to be happy first, which opens up our brains, and makes achieving that goal easier. And the best way to be happy, embrace our inner weirdo and stand out from the crowd.
So who is your inner weirdo? Perhaps it's time to let him/her out a little. Perhaps, like in a previous blog post, we should let that weirdo into our alter-ego and introduce them to the world.