Shawn Achor spent 12 years at Harvard University and is a leading expert on happiness and success.
His work has been featured in Harvard Business Review and his TED talk has over 25 million views.
Shawn has spoken in more than 50 countries to diverse audiences including the White House staff at Camp David.
He has written best-selling books like “The Happiness Advantage” and created successful training programs.
Shawn’s research on stress and positive psychology has been published in top journals and he has even discussed his mission with Oprah at her house.
Below you will find the best quotes by Shawn Achor.
Best Shawn Achor Quotes
Without action, knowledge is often meaningless. ~ Shawn Achor.
Happiness is not just a mood – it’s a work ethic. ~ Shawn Achor.
Happiness inspires productivity. ~ Shawn Achor.
The person we have the greatest power to change is ourselves. ~ Shawn Achor.
Happiness is a mindset for your journey, not the result of your destination. ~ Shawn Achor.
Beliefs are so powerful because they dictate our efforts and actions. ~ Shawn Achor.
You spend money on Internet connection for your employees. Why not spend money on the energy that fuels their brains? ~ Shawn Achor.
Positivity is such a high predicator of success rates. ~ Shawn Achor.
We become more successful when we are happier and more positive. ~ Shawn Achor.
Scientifically, happiness is a choice. It is a choice about where your single processor brain will devote its finite resources as you process the world. ~ Shawn Achor.
Happiness is the precursor to success. ~ Shawn Achor.
If we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average. ~ Shawn Achor.
Inspiring Shawn Achor Quotes
Habits are like financial capital – forming one today is an investment that will automatically give out returns for years to come. ~ Shawn Achor.
Study after study shows that happiness precedes important outcomes and indicators of thriving. ~ Shawn Achor.
Happiness asks us to be realistic about the present while maximizing our potential for the future. ~ Shawn Achor.
Studies have found that American teenagers are two and half times more likely to experience elevated enjoyment when engaged in a hobby than when watching TV, and three times more likely when playing a sport. And yet here’s the paradox: These same teenagers spend four times as many hours watching TV as they do engaging in sports or hobbies. ~ Shawn Achor.
Meditate. Neuroscientists have found that monks who spend years meditating actually grow their left prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most responsible for feeling happy. But don’t worry, you don’t have to spend years in sequestered, celibate silence to experience a boost. Take just five minutes each day to watch your breath go in and out. ~ Shawn Achor.
By changing our mindset and habits, we can actually dramatically change the course of life, improve intelligence, productivity, improve the quality of our lives, and improve every single education and business outcome. ~ Shawn Achor.
The greatest competitive advantage in our modern economy is a positive and engaged brain. ~ Shawn Achor.
Perhaps the most accurate term for happiness, then, is the one Aristotle used: “eudaimonia, which translates not directly to happiness” but to human flourishing. ~ Shawn Achor.
Look around at the people in your office, on the subway, sitting across from you at the cafe. Have you ever wondered if the world you see is the same one they see? ~ Shawn Achor.
The way we define happiness is the joy you feel striving toward your potential. ~ Shawn Achor.
Inspirational Shawn Achor Quotes
If all you strive for is diminishing the bad, you’ll only attain the average and you’ll miss out entirely on the opportunity to exceed the average. ~ Shawn Achor.
And only when we choose to believe that we live in a world where challenges can be overcome, our behavior matters, and change is possible can we summon all our drive, energy, and emotional. ~ Shawn Achor.
As St. Francis of Assisi in the thirteenth century said it best, Grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive. ~ Shawn Achor.
Our daily decisions and habits have a huge impact upon both our levels of happiness and success. ~ Shawn Achor.
When we are happy – when our mindset and mood are positive – we are smarter, more motivated, and thus more successful. Happiness is the center, and success revolves around it. ~ Shawn Achor.
I defined happiness as the joy we feel moving toward our potential. ~ Shawn Achor.
As we got more interested in time management and productivity, we lost the individual, and with that individual loss, we lost happiness as well. So I think the world has actually been malnourished as we’ve focused so much on productivity and ignored happiness and meaning to our own detriment. ~ Shawn Achor.
Money can buy happiness, but only if used to DO things as opposed to simply HAVE things. ~ Shawn Achor.
Waiting to be happy limits our brain’s potential for success, whereas cultivating positive brains makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative, and productive, which drives performance upward. ~ Shawn Achor.
Most people keep waiting on happiness, putting off happiness until they’re successful or until they achieve some goal, which means we limit both happiness and success. That formula doesn’t work. ~ Shawn Achor.
Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time. ~ Shawn Achor.
Happiness is about learning how to cultivate the mindset and behaviors that have been empirically proven to fuel greater success and fulfillment. ~ Shawn Achor.
Famous Shawn Achor Quotes
We not only need to work happy, we need to work at being happy. ~ Shawn Achor.
Every second of our own experience has to be measured through a relative and subjective brain. In other words, “reality” is merely our brain’s relative understanding of the world based on where and how we are observing it. ~ Shawn Achor.
Happiness is an incredible competitive advantage. ~ Shawn Achor.
Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals. ~ Shawn Achor.
The fastest way to disengage an employee is to tell him his work is meaningful only because of the paycheck. ~ Shawn Achor.
One of the most powerful forces in human nature is our belief that change is possible. ~ Shawn Achor.
You have to train your brain to be positive just like you work out your body. ~ Shawn Achor.
Happiness implies a positive mood in the present and a positive outlook for the future. ~ Shawn Achor.
As researchers at New York University have found, putting unrealistic, fantastical goals onto a vision board actually makes us feel worse about ourselves because it makes us think we are missing out on life. ~ Shawn Achor.
Top Shawn Achor Quotes
Before potential, there is a motivation. Before motivation, there is an emotion. And before emotion, there is your reality. ~ Shawn Achor.
The Tetris Effect – When our brains get stuck in a pattern that focuses on stress, negativity, and failure, we set ourselves up to fail. This principle teaches us how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see – and seize – opportunity wherever we look. ~ Shawn Achor.
Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it’s the realization that we can. ~ Shawn Achor.
Success does not mean happiness. Check out any celebrity magazine to look for examples to disabuse you of thinking that being beautiful, successful or rich will make you happy. ~ Shawn Achor.
As Harvard Business School professor Peter Bregman advises, ‘Don’t write a book, write a page… Don’t expect to be a great manager in your first six months, just try to set expectations well. ~ Shawn Achor.
All it takes is consciously remembering that we need to include others in our reality. ~ Shawn Achor.
Successful people see adversity as a stepping stone rather than a stumbling block. ~ Shawn Achor.
I started to realize just how much our interpretation of reality changes our experience of that reality. ~ Shawn Achor.
This is a very important study because it shows that when we perceive a reality in which success is likely, that success become a self-fulfilling prophecy. ~ Shawn Achor.
What identity are you wearing today? ~ Shawn Achor.
Great Shawn Achor Quotes
It’s hard to find happiness after success if the goalposts of success keep changing. ~ Shawn Achor.
Happiness is actually an individual choice, even in the midst of negative circumstances. It’s not something our employers can give to us, though they can limit and influence that choice. ~ Shawn Achor.
You can study gravity forever without learning how to fly. ~ Shawn Achor.
Without action, knowledge is often meaningless. As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently. ~ Shawn Achor.
The absence of disease is not health. ~ Shawn Achor.
Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed. ~ Shawn Achor.
When we encounter an unexpected challenge of threat the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go. ~ Shawn Achor.
Happiness is such an incredible advantage in our life. When the human brain is positive, our intelligence rises, we stop diverting resources to think about anxiety. ~ Shawn Achor.
Research shows you get multiple tasks done faster if you do them one at a time. It also decreases stress and raises happiness. ~ Shawn Achor.
Popular Shawn Achor Quotes
Each one of us is like that butterfly the Butterfly Effect. And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations our families and our communities. ~ Shawn Achor.
The contents of the glass don’t matter; what’s more important is to realize there’s a pitcher of water nearby. In other words, we have the capacity to refill the glass, or to change our outlook. ~ Shawn Achor.
When a manager openly expresses his faith in an employee’s skill, he doesn’t just improve mood and motivation; he actually improves their likelihood of succeeding. ~ Shawn Achor.
The point is, as we will see throughout this book, what we spend our time and mental energy focusing on can indeed become our reality. ~ Shawn Achor.
The best leaders are the ones who show their true colors not during the banner years but during times of struggle. ~ Shawn Achor.
So these were the 72 top Shawn Achor quotes and sayings.
If you like these quotes and sayings, then you can also read my other posts on Gretchen Rubin quotes and Greg Plitt quotes.
