英文美文：幸福是成功的秘诀吗

英文美文： 幸福是成功的秘诀吗
现代社会最大的文化迷思我们不能改变。研究证明你 可以变得更加乐观，但
是如果你优先考虑眼前的幸福，你会收获额外的好处。
Some people think if you are happy, you are blind to reality. But when we
research it, happiness actually raises every single business and educational
outcome for the brain. How did we miss this? Why do we have these societal
misconceptions about happiness? Because we assumed you were average.
When we study people, scientists are often interested in what the average
is. If we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average.
Many people think happiness is genetic. That's only half the story,
because the average person does not fight their genes. When we stop
studying the average and begin researching positive outliers -- people who are
above average for a positive dimension like optimism or intelligence -- a wildly
different picture emerges. Our daily decisions and habits have a huge impact
upon both our levels of happiness and success.
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. If you
scan for the negative first, your brain literally has no resources left over to see
the things you are grateful for or the meaning embedded in your work. But if
you scan the world for the positive, you start to reap an amazing advantage.
Now that there is research validity to these claims, the working world is
starting to take notice. In January, I wrote the cover story for the Harvard
Business Review magazine on
article called
Advantage, I outlined our researched conclusion: the single greatest
advantage in the modern economy is a happy and engaged workforce.
A decade of research in the business world proves that happiness raises
nearly every business and educational outcome: raising sales by 37%,
productivity by 31%, and accuracy on tasks by 19%, as well as a myriad of
health and quality-of-life improvements.
Given the unprecedented level of unhappiness at companies and the
direct link between happiness and business outcomes, the question is NOT
whether happiness should matter to companies. Given this research, it clearly
should. The first question is: What can I do in my own life to reap the
advantage of happiness?

Training your brain to be positive at work is just like training your muscles
at the gym. Sounds simple, right? Well, think about how easy it is to make
yourself go to the gym. The key with any new resolution is to make it a habit.
New research on neuroplasticity -- the ability of the brain to change even as an
adult -- reveals that moderate actions can rewire the brain as you create
habits.
In The Happiness Advantage, I challenge readers to do one brief positive
exercise every day for 21 days. Only through behavioral change can
information become transformation.
? Write down three new things you are grateful for each day;
? Write for two minutes a day describing one positive experience you had
over the past 24 hours;
? Exercise for 10 minutes a day;
? Meditate for two minutes, focusing on your breath going in and out;
? Write one quick email first thing in the morning thanking or praising
someone in your social support network (family member, friend, old teacher).
But does it work? In the midst of the worst tax season in history I did a
three- hour intervention at auditing and tax accounting firm KPMG, describing
how to reap the happiness advantage by creating one of these positive habits.
Four months later, there was a 24% improvement in job and life satisfaction.
Not only is change possible, this is one of the first long-term ROI (return on
investment) studies proving that happiness leads to long-term quantifiable
positive change.
In a study I performed on 1,600 Harvard students in 2007, I found that
there was a 0.7 correlation between perceived social support and happiness.
This is higher than the connection between smoking and cancer. So if in the
modern world we give up our social networks to work away from friends and
follow celebrities on Twitter, we are trading off with our happiness and health.
Following up, I switched around the questions and asked how much social
support employees provided (instead of received). The results were off the
charts. Those high on provision of social support are 10 times more engaged
at work and have a 40% higher likelihood of promotion over the next four years.
In other words, giving at the office gets you more than receiving.

The greatest cultural myth in modern society is that we cannot change. My
research proves that you can not only become more positive, but if you
prioritize happiness in the present, you can reap an extraordinary advantage.