Why Your Free Time Is So Draining Success Magazine, Shawn Achor August 18, 2017 As Cathy sits tethered to her desk on Tuesday, she daydreams about the upcoming Saturday and all of its possibilities. She wants to go biking on the trail by her house, join in a pickup soccer game at the local park…
You Have Enormous Potential Success Magazine, Shawn Achor March 15, 2017 What is the longest sequence of numbers a person can remember? How tall can a human being grow? How long can a person live? The Guinness World Records book lists many of the greatest records set and the greatest potentials achieved. But it’s a fossil record.…
Resilience is About How You Recharge, Not How You Endure Harvard Business Review, Shawn Achor and Michelle Gielan June 24, 2016 As constant travelers and parents of a 2-year-old, we sometimes fantasize about how much work we can do when one of us gets on a plane, undistracted by phones, friends, and Finding Nemo. We race to…
Why You Should Map Your Mental World Success Magazine, Shawn Achor March 10, 2016 While working as a teaching fellow for one of my psychology professors at Harvard University, I often conducted an insightful experiment called mental mapping in which students created a map of the world around them. The experiment was simple—students had three…
Don’t Sprint the Marathon Success Magazine, Shawn Achor December 2015 I once worked with a company vice president who wanted to run a marathon. Although she wasn’t in great shape and her workload limited her preparation for a marathon, she thought that if she could lead a team across three continents, then she could run…
Why You Need to Stop Worrying About Failing Success Magazine, Shawn Achor October 2015 Do you know what “icing the kicker” means? In football, when a kicker is preparing to make a potential game-winning field goal, the opposing coach will often call a timeout right before the ball is snapped. The thinking behind this strategy…
SUCCESS Magazine, Shawn Achor April 2015 We often think that if we had more choices, it would be easier to change our lives. In fact, we dohave plenty of choices, but we don’t change. What we really need in our lives to make a positive change are fewer choices. In The Happiness Advantage, I wrote…
SUCCESS Magazine, Shawn Achor December 2014 The brilliant Amy Wrzesniewski from Yale University researches how people perceive their jobs. She found that the way a person sees his or her occupation—as a “calling,” as opposed to a “job”—doesn’t depend on the job title or position, but on the meaning he or she perceives in the…
October 15, 2014 Imagine how happy you would be if all your interactions with others were positive and pleasant. It sounds too good to be true, but it’s actually quite easy to establish. In 2009, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, split 100 participants into groups of four and filmed them working together to solve…
In the weeks following the Sandy Hook tragedy, the lead stories on the news have been truly heart wrenching. Sometimes I find I can’t bear to read or watch another story, and other times I simply can’t look away. As a parent of three girls, I desperately want to shelter my children from the negative…