Author Archives: Jasper Bergink

Index: For A State of Happiness, season 2013-2014

1 August 2014 09:26 ,

I am off in August, but don’t stress. There are over 40 posts on happiness in the season 2013-2014, so there must be something to catch up with.

Here’s an index of what I wrote on in the last ten months:

September 2013

  • 30: ‘On the Road‘. Inspired by Jack Kerouac, I start my journey dedicated to the discovery of happiness

October

  • 7: A Happiness Bookshelf. Moving in my new apartment, I created a bookshelf with happiness books to make my house a happy place.
  • 12: The manufacture of happiness. Together with my former colleague Maroussia, I wrote about how we can fabricate happiness – and it’s still authentic!
  • 14: I do like Mondays. Mondays. They’ve a bad reputation, but I think they’re fine. Monday is my blogging day.
  • 21: Matthieu Ricard’s plea for altruism. Matthieu Ricard is quite an interesting figure. A scientist, a monk, and arguably a happiness popstar? He now has written a book on altruism.
  • 28: Never trust Einstein’s wisdom. There are great quotes on happiness all over the internet. But who said those words?

November

December

January

  • 6: The lottery of happiness. When winning a lottery brings misery instead pleasure.
  • 12: The Happy City. Lessons from Bhutan. Stadsleven organises a talkshow about happiness in Amsterdam. I wrote a post about what Bhutan and Gross National Happiness could teach the city.
  • 20: Fitter, happier. Radiohead has a song about New Year’s Resolutions!
  • 27: Utopia. In a Dutch TV show, fifteen people try to build the ultimate society.

February

  • 3: The Happy City. After the Stadsleven talkshow, I share what I learnt about the design and social fabric of a happy city.
  • 7: hAPPiness. A guest post by Sanne of Stadsleven on how iPhone apps and Twitter can measure our happiness.
  • 10: The politics of well-being. Why are happiness and well-being so difficult for politicians?
  • 17 : Gross European Happiness. In a guest post for YPFP, I challenge EU policy-makers to take up the challenge to make Gross European Happiness a reality.
  • 24: The special power of music. Music = happiness. Clearly.

March

April

  • 7: Frohes Schaffen. On our identity as workers.
  • 14: Tune in to radio. Announcing I joined a radio show, and giving some hints about questions on happiness I want to answer.
  • 21: Condivivere – a neologism for ‘sharing life’ in Italian. That was what I took from the radio show!
  • 28: Apart from Christmas time, the only day I skipped… Let’s say it was my Easter break.

May

  • 5: Serious play & happy gin-tonics. I spent a Saturday trying to record an own version of Pharrell’s Happy. The efforts failed but it was fun anyway!
  • 12: An EU Happiness Manifesto. I didn’t run for election, but wanted to inspire candidates for the EU elections.
  • 19: Runner’s high: “the body of man is capable of much curious pleasure”. Or, the feast of completing the 20 kilometers of Brussels. Running, that is.
  • 26: The EU elections. Taking a break from happy-blogging, I wrote about the ’empty side’ of the European Parliament and the embarrassment in France after the EU elections instead.
  • 29: Felicita! Sharing the lessons from my radio interview (in Italian) about happiness

June

  • 2: The Independent’s Top 100 (of happiness, not of wealth). Personal stories about unknown people who make Britain happier, every day.
  • 11: The Happiness Advantage: Shawn Achor has a conviction: being happy makes us more successful.
  • 16: Van Persie, football & happiness. On the contribution made by a pass by Daley Blind and a header by flying Dutchman Robin van Persie to my happiness.
  • 23: RFK: measure what makes life worthwhile. The background of the quote (courtesy Robert F. Kennedy) that made me question Gross Domestic Product and look for well-being as an alternative.
  • 30: Where the life is good. On the benefits of regional, instead of national, well-being and happiness statistics collected by the OECD. How do you think Brussels is doing?

July

  • 7: A feel good video to witness happiness. How a commercial for a Thai life insurer teaches us about happiness (I know, who would have thought!).
  • 14: How will buy your happiness?. The old-age question: can money buy happiness? TED speaker Michael Norton helps me to answer: yes, if spent wisely, it does!
  • 21: The morality of the market. With the help of philosopher Michael Sandel, I ask whether friends can be rented and everything can be bought.
  • 28: On the road, the sequel. The discovery of happiness started in September. And in July, I summarise what I learnt before taking my holiday break.

Enjoy the summer and see you back in September for the season 2014-2015!

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On the road, the sequel

31 July 2014 22:51 ,

The first post on For A State of Happiness appeared ten months ago. After preparing for several months, I had promised myself to launch the blog in September. I barely made the deadline – the first post was written on the evening of Monday 30 September, in half an hour.

With an allusion to Jack Kerouac, I wrote that this was my first step on the road to the discovery of happiness.

And indeed, I’ve discovered a couple of things about happiness in the last year. I had promised myself to work seriously on the blog for at least a year. 40+ blog posts later, I think I am well on my way!

And these are some of the things I learnt in the last year:

Happiness indeed is a discovery.

There are so many different ways of looking at it: from the perspectives of psychology, economics, political science, neuroscience, genetics, behavioral economics, philosophy. Learning never ends.

Happiness is personal – and collective

One of the most interesting things of happiness, I think, is that happiness both a very personal thing (about our personal happiness) and a collective thing (about quality of life, well-being and the common good in a state or society). This conviction has grown more and more in me.

Happiness reveals itself in small bits and pieces

Writing one (interesting) blog post a week on happiness is easy! Since it’s such a broad topic, there are many ways to approach the topic. The ultimate article on happiness does not exist. But with every blog posts, one element of happiness reveals itself. Every piece of a large caleidoscope of happiness.

Everybody is searching for happiness

At least everybody I know. That means that both friends and strangers are interested in my endeavours to understand happiness. It has motivated me to look into aspects I hadn’t thought of, to publish elsewhere, and to create a newsletter.

You might wonder what the effect on my own happiness is. I did not start this project to become happier. The aim was to understand happiness, not to be it. But still, as a side effect, it has helped me to be happier. Reading a lot about happiness, I’ve learnt how certain mechanisms in the human brain work.

I’m more aware of how my brain (and my heart) react to positive and negative experiences. Sometimes I get frustrated about something small and insignificant. Maybe I miss a metro, and I’m very impatient waiting for the next one. I’ve started to diagnose myself in these situation, and tell myself: “this moment of frustration will disappear. You can’t control when the metro arrives, but you can influence how you deal with it. Just leave it”.

The first year of this blog has been extremely good. Over the year, being a happiness blogger became part of who I am. And I know the next year will be very interesting as well. I have some great ideas to develop the blog and myself as a happiness researcher. I’ll work a bit on that in the summer. And after that, the road to the discovery of happiness will continue.

I’m taking off August, see you back in September! And in case you can’t wait that long, take a look at some of the posts you might have missed during the season 2013-2014.

 

 

 

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The morality of the market: can everything be bought?

21 July 2014 12:48 ,

Can everything be bought?

Last week I wrote about ‘Happy Money’, written by Harvard professor Michael Norton, and concluded with him that happiness can be ‘bought’ when money is spent wisely.

Today, I want to face another question: should it be possible to buy everything with money, even if it is unjust, unfair or immoral? Another Harvard professor, philosopher Michael Sandel, has written a book pondering all facets of this question.

I bought Sandel’s book ‘What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets’ in February, shortly before travelling to my course on happiness economics at Schumacher College. His prose made me realise how evasively money has entered all domains of life and how absurd some transactions are.

Allow an ad on your forehead: $777

In his book, he dives into various weird, and sometimes even out rightly wrong, areas of capitalism:

  • Lobbyist pay homeless people to wait in line for Congress hearings in Washington  (quite sure this does not happen in Brussels): $10-20 per hour.
  • The pay a six-year-old school child in Dallas gets for reading a book: $2.
  • Compensation for offering your forehead as an advertising space for Air New Zealand: $777.
  • If you are a woman addicted to drugs, you can ‘earn’ money by agreeing to sterilisation: $300.
  • Markets crowding out social values: priceless.

Some of these are clear excesses of capitalism, whilst others are a little more subtle. In a way, money and power have always mattered. Wealthy businessmen are sponsoring the presidential campaign Obama in the hope to get rewarded with an ambassador post or a certain policy. Or they might make a donation to an Ivy League university in the hope their children will be taken on. Like it or not, but I fear it is how the world works and worked for centuries. But even if that is reality, it does go against the principle of equality we all sympathise with – unless we risk losing out ourselves.

Rent-A-Friend: $10 per hour

Still, we know that these things feel a lot better and authentic when they are deserved. In 2000, a Dutch movie ‘Rent A Friend’ came out, about an an agency that rented out ‘friends’ to people that felt lonely. Despite the feeling that friendship can’t be bought, the idea has been taken up in real life: www.rentafriend.com boasts being able to offer over 500,000 ‘friends’, starting at $10 a hour, though many will waive their fee if you take them to a concert or sports event – very generous!

Markets in life and death 

Markets should have limits, argues Sandel. And it should be us as people, citizens, consumers to pose them. One of the most fascinating chapters talks about the markets of life and death. He documents many examples where life and death are sold and bought. For instance, he speaks of ‘celebrity death pools’, where people place bets on who is most likely to die.

Death list is one of these sites (though it appears there is no money involved). ‘Hopes’ are her on a death for Prince Philip or Stephen Hawking; Fidel Castro is on for the 11th year. Castro also makes it to a list at ranker.com. Here, voters have a good hand; six names out of the top ten have died this year.

But Sandel cites even crazier and more repulsive practices: employers  take life insurances on their employees, and then cash the payout if they die prematurely. Or people trade on the terrorism futures market, which rewards people who rightly guess when and where terrorists strikes, and how many people are killed.

Bring morals back to the market

From a capitalists perspective, there is nothing wrong with this. It is a market, and people are only accountable to themselves for their transactions. But as Sandel indicates, there are too many absurd, immoral, and sometimes plain wrong things that are bought and sold. And all this should stop.

Still, I don’t think laws and regulation are not the best ways to put limits to these markets. It is a moral issue, and it is our responsibility as citizens to reflect on our decisions and follow or moral compass. The limits of markets are set by consumers and nobody else. In recent decades, we have allowed ourselves to go way too far. It’s time to bring morals back to the market.

Everything can be bought. But markets crowding out social values: priceless.

 

Little surprise: also Sandel has given a TED talk about his work.

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The second newsletter is out

19 July 2014 13:14 ,

The second newsletter is out!

The newsletter of the blog is called ‘A Little Dose of Happiness’, and wants to do exactly that: ship a little dose of happiness, straight to your inbox.

If you missed it, drop me a line. And of course, you can subscribe to the newsletter here.

 

A screenshot of (part of) the second edition:

Picture 2

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How will you buy your happiness

14 July 2014 12:15 ,

Money can’t buy happiness, or so goes the common wisdom.

money can't buy happiness

Some say that despite this, it is more comfortable crying in a Porsche than on a bicycle. Others say that even if money can’t buy you happiness, it can buy a jet ski, which is pretty close.

money happiness jetski

TEDx speaker Michael Norton offers his own take on the matter. His research illustrates that if you think that money can’t buy happiness, you’re just not spending it right.

Norton is an associate professor in Business Administration at Harvard University and the co-author of ‘Happy Money: The Science of Smarter Spending.’ Of their five principles on happy money, I would like to focus on two: buying experiences and investing in others.

Buying experiences
One of the best ways to get the most bang for your happiness buck is to spend money on experiences. It’s not material goods, but rather, the special moments in our lives that we cherish. No matter what we buy, we adapt to material goods quickly. A new pair of shoes or amazing coffee machine will only retain its magic for a short period of time. Memories of special moments spent with fun people, however, don’t fade. Therefore, Norton’s advice is to go see a friend that you haven’t seen for a long time when the opportunity arises, and accept a monetary loss to book that great trip to Latin America. The fulfillment you’ll get will be a lot higher than for any luxury good purchase.

Spending money on others
A second way to ‘invest’ money in happiness is to spend it on others. In Norton’s talk, he explains the experiment that lead to this conclusion. And to test it, they gave money away. The setup of the experiment was simple: they gave Canadian students small amounts of money, around $5 or $20. Half were instructed to use it to buy something for themselves; the other half were asked to get a little gift for someone else. At the end of the day, the students answered a short survey about their happiness.

The conclusions were clear: for the students who bought something for themselves – say, a coffee or makeup – there were no major differences in happiness. But those who had bought something for others reported higher happiness levels. Further studies confirmed that the effect does not apply only to this particular demographic (Canadian students), but that the patterns were strikingly similar in Uganda and nearly everywhere else.

How will you buy your happiness?

An earlier version of this post was published on the blog of TEDxAmsterdam, as part of my series ‘TED & Happiness’, exploring some of the fifty plus talks related to happiness in TED’s library. Earlier posts covered flow (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi) and ‘happiness advantage‘ (Shawn Achor).

Thanks to Tori Egherman for editing and for the illustration below.

SPENDING-ON

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A feel good video to witness happiness

7 July 2014 22:04 ,

Editing a blog about happiness provides so many doses of positivity and optimism. Now people know about my interest (or passion, or obsession, according to some) to understand how happiness works, I often receive links to nice videos and articles to the topic. I received this one from one of my colleagues.

This is a feel good video and commercial at the same time – it’s a Thai life insurance company telling us about happiness. Feel good is a difficult genre, especially for companies. If the story is too sweet, or over the top, your ad becomes cheesy. But I think their video strikes the right tone and shares a story that everybody can feel – and witness happiness.

The story reminds us how small and big, and simple, happiness is: if the seeds of kindness and optimism are sown everyday, happiness can flourish.

Posted in: personal, video , Tagged: , , , , ,

Where the life is good: the OECD’s Regional Well-Being index

30 June 2014 09:18 ,

[Gross Domestic Product] measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile

Robert F. Kennedy, 1968

The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has taken Kennedy’s words to heart. Through its Better Life Index, it is conducting an impressive work programme to analyse quality of life in the 34 developed countries that constitute its membership. The OECD index provides a broad overview of quality life, measuring the performance of countries on various important issues, from housing to environment and from civic engagement to life satisfaction. Like  the Gross National Happiness (GNH) concept, the Better Life Index indicates what the good places to live are in a much broader sense than the mere economic data of GDP could do. Wealth’s correlation with happiness is limited at best, scientists have shown time and again.

But there remains a problem with this kind of national indices: they provide national averages – and do not say anything about the extremes and the equality of the data. California differs from Vermont. Sicily is not the same as Südtirol, the German-speaking part of Italy. To take account of regional differences in quality of life, the OECD has now released a similar website on regional well-being.

Some of the observations:

  • The balance varies a lot across regions. In California, income, jobs and education are at higher levels then in Vermont, but for safety and civic engagement the golden state is a lot worse off than Vermont.
  • Brussels is performing a lot worse on jobs (1.5 points out of 10) and environment (1.6) then I would think, but apparently has a high level of civic engagement (8.6).
  • Across the board, Dutch regions reach high scores, except for income and environment. All over the Netherlands, safety and access to services are close to perfect 10s.
  • Südtirol (or province of Bolzano) is indeed a different world from Sicily. The differences are most striking in the rate for jobs (8.8 vs 0.5). Italy’s figures confirm the large divide in incomes between North and South, whilst incomes are most equal in Austria.
  • Czech regions, to my mind, score surprisingly bad in health but almost all have full scores of 10 for education, here defined as the level of people with secondary education or higher.
  • The Mexican region of Jalisco has adopted well-being as a guiding principle in its policies. Still, it has a lot of space for improvement when compared with regions of richer OECD countries. The region already scores well on jobs and environment. And as a survey from a local NGO suggest, the comparable low scores do not mean that people perceive a low level of well-being. According to their figures, 67% in the region feels prosperous.
Picture 1

Brussels Capital Region, the region where I live, scores well on civic engagement and access to services, but has a lot to improve for jobs and environment. Source: OECD

So What?

Lists and rankings have a broader use than providing bloggers something to browse through on a Sunday night. They can bring order to life – be it by classifying which celebrities are hot and which are not lists, listing the best goals of the World Cup so far (no surprise, Flying Dutchman van Persie tops the list), or of countries which provide the most creative ideas (Ireland is first according to TED).

The OECD list, similarly, provides a benchmark of how regions performance. Seeing where you outperform peers or lag behind gives a motivation to improve. The index can help regions to decide where to focus their resources, and thus make better-informed decision how to spend civil servants’ time and money. As our representatives, politicians and administration should learn from these data. The data can help our administration to perform their duty: continuous improvement of our collective well-being.

Examples of well-being projects in some regions are already included on the OECD site.

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Robert F. Kennedy: measure what makes life worthwhile

23 June 2014 08:53 ,

If there is one icon that inspires me in my discoveries on For A State Of Happiness, it is Robert. F. Kennedy. In a way, this is a bit ridiculous. For a large part, my image of the man is based on an extract of barely 300 words in a speech delivered almost five decades ago. There must be leaders alive in our times who have something to say about the topic.

Robert F. Kennedy (or RFK) was the seventh out of nine children in the Kennedy family. He served as Attorney General is his brother John’s administration. After the murder of JFK, RFK was one of the most prominent members of the Democrats. In 1968, he ran for President.

JFK and RFK kept a joint diary with quotes that inspired them. Many of those are aphorisms from old Greek philosophers, like Plato. French writer Albert Camus was another favourite. I really like the idea and have started my own notebook. I imagine I can look back at the quotes in some years and be re-inspired by them.

In 1968, RFK was one of the candidates in the Democratic primaries for the position of President of the United States. On 18 March, he delivered a long speech at the University of Kansas. Amongst others, the speech talks about civil rights, inequality and the Vietnam war. But he (or his speech writer) also gave an extremely sharp critique of Gross Domestic Product. It has a central place in my own notebook, and I’d like to quote a full extract:

“And this is one of the great tasks of leadership for us, as individuals and citizens this year.  But even if we act to erase material poverty, there is another greater task, it is to confront the poverty of satisfaction – purpose and dignity – that afflicts us all.  Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things.

Our Gross National Product, now, is over $800 billion dollars a year, but that Gross National Product – if we judge the United States of America by that – that Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage.  It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them.  It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl.  It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities.  It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.

Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play.  It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.  It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.  And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

That was on 18 March 1968. What has happened next? The US went through a volatile time. Martin Luther King was murdered on 4 April. RFK had the same fate on 5 June. And the elections that year were won by the Republican Richard Nixon.

This month, it is 46 years ago that RFK died. Who knows what could have brought into motion if RFK had won the Presidency…?

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Football & happiness: the feelgood factor of Van Persie

16 June 2014 21:57 ,

Whether you are a football lover or football hater, you will have noticed that the World Cup has started. Time for me to ask the question: do good performances make countries happier?

Let me take a – randomly selected – example. As a Dutchman, my expectations ahead of last Friday’s match against Spain were very low. We had lost the World Cup final against them in 2010. Spain’s selection contains a list of stars that rivals any team. Their team is experienced, having won three tournaments in a row: no match for our defense on young and unexperienced players.

How wrong we were!

The match turned out to be one of the best stories of Dutch football ever written. In the first half, the Orange Clockwork started slow. After an undeserved penalty, Spain led 1 to 0.

But just before half time, when we already had given up on our chances, something majestic happened. Daley Blind, at the left side of the field, gave a long pass, and the new Flying Dutchman Robin van Persie scored a goal that will go into history as one of the most beautiful ones ever: 1-1.

And this was just a start. The Dutch team – and fans everywhere – went crazy. Arjen Robben: 2-1, revenge for the lost final 2010. Defender Stefan de Vrij, after a scrimmage in front of the goal: 3-1. And Van Persie and Robben went on to score an improbable 4-1 and 5-1. The feeling was amazing. The beer was good. The girls in orange dresses were pretty. Even Dutch music of poor quality was good enough to sing along to. Viva Hollandia! And the good feeling persists. Waking up the next day – with a collective hangover – the result was still the same. 5-1. We beat three time champions Spain 5 to 1!

 

I guess one can safely say: yes, football results affect the collective well-being of a country. But beyond strong anecdotal evidence, let’s see what academics say about it. Indeed, there are several academic and popular-scientific studies about this question of life and death.

The host advantage

In their book Soccernomics, Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski show that hosting a World Cup increases happiness levels in a country until several years after the event. National pride increases when visitors from all around the world are received in the home country. However, this effect does not appear in Brazil, where many people strongly oppose the World Cup. Street art protests dot the walls of their cities, and even the 3-1 win against Croatia, courtesy of the referee, on the opening night seems to have done little to increase the mood.

Brazil World Cup

Suicide and strokes

Kuper and Szymanski also show that stories about increasing numbers of suicide after dramatic losses are a myth. To the contrary, World Cups are social events involving the entire community, including depressed people. But football does carry a health risk: matches can create stress and thus contribute to heart attacks. A study, in a scientific article with the improbable title “A matter of life and death: population mortality and football results”, found a correlation between heart attacks and home defeats: male supporters of the English teams of Newcastle United, Sunderland, Middlesbrough, and Leeds United are more likely to die from a stroke when their team loses in its own field! For instance, in Sunderland, stroke deaths increased by 66% in men when Sunderland AFC lost at home.

Today it matters, tomorrow it doesn’t

Another study by Kavetsos and Szymanski finds that the impact of sports success on happiness is mainly short term, and not statistically significant in the longer term. Beyond the home nation advantage, a second positive effect appears when a team, like the Netherlands on Friday, beats the expectations. But rather than a long-standing legacy effect, football results only are a positive feel-good factor for a short time. This also confirms the finding of a seminal study concluding that whether you win the lottery or end up in a wheelchair today, your happiness level is the same in one year time.

Whether you win or lose, in three months it doesn’t matter anymore, claims psychologist Dan Glibert. But I live today, and not in three months from now. And today, I am happy.

Today, Robin van Persie and Daley Blind provide sheer happiness.

RVP

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Shawn Achor and the happiness advantage

11 June 2014 08:25 ,

This post was first published on the blog of TEDxAmsterdam. TED’s library contains about fifty talks on happiness. After the post about the flow of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, this is the second article in my series of articles under the title TED & Happiness. In this talk, I want to introduce Shawn Achor, positive psychologist and happiness researcher. His message is simple: happiness works. With humor and self-mockery, he reveals how our mental well-being is linked to a positive outlook on life.

A positive outlook

Shawn Achor

Shawn Achor, source: Good Think inc.

Shawn Achor begins his twelve minute happy rollercoaster ride with a simple anecdote illustrating how fundamental optimism is for our happiness. Seven-year-old Shawn was a reckless little boy. Playing war, he happened to throw his five-year-old sister Amy from her bed. Tears began to fill her eyes. But he managed to turn the situation around with: “Amy, you landed on all fours. That means… you must be a unicorn!” he said, keeping her calm and avoiding being punished by his parents.

The mechanism is simple, but it works! Changing our lens changes our happiness. Positive psychologists have shown that the way we experience our lives is a factor that explains some of the variation in our happiness (a scientifically important nuance – it does not directly predict our happiness,  though some people, even scholars, believe that optimism always creates happiness). And a happy, positive outlook in turn has a ripple effect, making experiences of life more pleasant: the happiness advantage, as Achor calls it.

See his short pitch of the idea in this video.

Reverse the formula for happiness

Nowadays, our assumption simply is that we need to do. If we do things well, we are successful. And when we become successful, we should be happy. But there is a problem: we are never satisfied. When we reach the finish line, we move the goalposts of success, and start all over again.

Let’s take a look at an example. When we graduate, what we want is a job. When we have a job, we want a better salary. Then we want more responsibility, etc. When we have achieved a goal, we repeat this cycle and look at the next goal, thus continuously pushing success towards a horizon we can never reach.

Achor asks us to reverse the formula. What if we reach success when we are happy? What if we work well, because we are happy? And what if it is happiness that inspires productivity instead of the other way around?

The happiness advantage: accomplishment & gratitude

Happiness starts with simple things. A feeling of accomplishment. Learning, creativity and developments. But above all: gratitude with the achievements of every little day.

Achor has a simple recipe for that. Spend two minutes a day for three weeks thinking about optimism and success. Everyday, write down three new things you are grateful for. If you do that for three weeks, it will have a lasting effect.

That’s the happiness advantage.

Thanks to Tori Egherman for editing.

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