TEDtalk Tuesday: Changing the way we achieve happiness

You know, I really seem to be on a happiness binge with these TEDtalks--or maybe that's just TED.

Either way, here is your TEDtalk for today (I started this at 11pm on Tuesday, it still counts!)

This guy's name is Shawn Achor, and he "accidentally" broke his sister's arm when she was five in order to save her from being in the path of an imaginary sniper bullet. He still has yet to be thanked.  =)

He also applied to Harvard on a dare...and he got in.  O_O

In all seriousness though (kinda?), he has some hugely important messages to share with all of us:

• "...if we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average."--on research
• it's possible to be a male medical student at Yale named Bobo who has leprosy AND menopause.  (5:54)
• and most importantly: The formula for success is wrong. (9:11)

"If I work harder, I'll be more successful.
And if I'm more successful, then I'll be happier."

WRONG!

What I like most about Shawn's talk is that he's hilarious. He has obviously done this talk many times over, and he knows just where to put the funny stuff where it mixes with the actual theory.

We're left with funny theory. Ha. (I thought that was funny.  It must be getting late.)

He starts off his talk with an allegory of how he tricked his sister into not crying after she "fell" off the bunk bed, and how that's directly related to positive psychology, which is a fairly recent branch of soft science (invented in 1998 by Malcolm Gladwell).

The only downside to his talk is that he talks really fast. He slows down during the funny parts, but tends to speed up during the statistics, which gets a little confusing until you realize that he follows the list of rapid-fire statistics with a summary the general point of his listing anyway. 

He enlightened me on the benefits of positive thinking---and that kind of thinking really applies to all of us. Whether it be because we're "having bad days" because our PMSing roommates are bringing us down, or because that guy we have is becoming more of a "maybe guy", or even if you just watch the news at night--thinking about one positive thing at the end of the day will really turn your day around.  That way, you can answer the question: "How was your day yesterday?" with a "It was great!" rather than a mediocre "It was okay."

He does studies at at his company that researches positive outliers.  (Remember, when you graphed a set of data and it came out nice and neat except for that one bratty dot way off to the left?  That one dot that completely threw off your line of best fit?) Your teachers ended up telling you that you probably screwed up the measurements, didn't they?

Well, Shawn Achor doesn't think that these positive outliers are mistakes. 

His company looks at those positive outliers and sees people who are well above human average, and he does research on these outliers to see where human potential, happiness, and success intersect, and he's come to some amazing conclusions.  

Let me know what you think. Are his ideas crap? Are the outliers really "above-average people" often enough to warrant expensive research to see how we can attain higher "averages"? Can thinking positively for 21 days straight really change your happiness levels? Does he impress you as much as he does me when he starts spouting off impressively high numbers in his statistics?

If you're interested, watch the TEDtalk (it's about 12 min and you'll laugh for 10 of them). And then join me for Part 2 tomorrow (hopefully).