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The Happy Secret To Better Work

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26 views

The Happy Secret To Better Work

Uploaded by

x.taylex.x
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The Happy Secret to Better Work – Shaun Achor

1. At the beginning of the TED talk, the speaker Shaun Achor tells the audience a story from
his childhood about him and his sister playing war on top of their bunk beds. He explains
that somehow, his sister managed to fall off the bed onto her hands and knees. When she
started to cry, he quickly told her that she had landed exactly like a unicorn would have.
She broke out into a smile and climbed back into the bed. He and his sister had just
experienced positive psychology, albeit two decades before the term was officially
coined. When he moves on, he explains how in statistics of any kind, one tends to remove
any strange outliers. However, when it comes to positive psychology, he wants outliers to
exist so he can study why they’re so much different than the rest. He then continues to
tell of his life at Harvard, which he applied to as a joke but won a scholarship and ended
up staying there for many years. He became a counselor that lived with the students
during their college experience. Shaun noticed that instead of focusing on how they got
there and their privilege/intelligence, they focused more on the coursework and stressing
over deadlines. He ends the talk with a brief explanation on how he has found a way to
train the brain to be more positive by having people write down three things they’re
grateful for over a span of 21 days. After that, their brains began to see the world in a
more positive light rather than focusing so hard on the negative.

2. His entire story about his time at Harvard was what stood out the most to me during this
TED talk.

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