How to challenge your self-limiting beliefs with Shawn Achor

**Shawn Achor** (0:00)
I think AI is amazing at helping us with tasks. It can predict the odds of whether or not you'll survive cancer, or whether or not you'll successfully land a job. But it can never believe that you can overcome those odds. Belief requires an essence of willpower. It changes whether or not we try to make friends, or to date, or to get jobs. Beliefs change not only the math about what's possible and probable, but it changes our path too.

**Adam Grant** (0:27)
Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to ReThinking, my podcast with Ted on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people who explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.
Shawn Achor is a positive psychology evangelist best known for his case that happiness drives success, not the other way around. He gave one of the first viral TED Talks about it.

**Shawn Achor** (0:55)
When I was seven years old and my sister was just five years old, we were playing on top of a bunk bed. Somehow without any help or push from her older brother at all, suddenly Amy disappeared off at the top of the bunk bed and landed with this crash on the floor. She had landed painfully on her hands and knees on all fours on the ground. I said, Amy, Amy, wait, don't cry, don't cry. Did you see how you landed? No human lands on all fours like that.
Amy, I think this means you're a unicorn.
The smile spread across her face and she scrambled right back up onto the bunk bed with all the grace of a baby unicorn, with one broken leg. What we had stumbled across is something called Positive Psychology, which is the reason that I'm here today and the reason that I wake up every morning.

**Adam Grant** (1:40)
In his latest book, The Power of Beliefs, Shawn gets into another aspect of Positive Psychology. He argues that if we can change what we believe, we can change meaningful things in our lives.

**Shawn Achor** (1:53)
It's been way too long. I'm so grateful to get to see you again.

**Adam Grant** (1:56)
What I really want to know is, how's Amy?

**Shawn Achor** (1:58)
Amy, the unicorn's doing great. She still requires some royalties for me using her unicorn story for the TED Talk, but she's doing wonderful. She has three kids, one who just went off to college, so she's thriving.

**Adam Grant** (2:11)
When most people think of Shawn Achor, that's the first thing they think of, that success may not bring happiness, but happiness can breed success. How do you square that view with the fact that so many successful people are unhappy?

**Shawn Achor** (2:24)
So I think that people can be extraordinarily successful or wealthy and perform well in sports and still be negative and grumpy and cynical and pessimistic. And you and I both met a lot of those people. But when you look at the role that optimism plays in improving performance across the board, everything from performance on tests, to performance in sports, to longevity, to social relationships improve. So what my assumption would be is that yes, there are those people, but they're actually underperforming their ability. At the same time, the other thing that would say is that factors into that question about success. We know great biographies of people who are extraordinarily mean or negative or hard on themselves, who have been prolific performers and musicians and CEOs, but then they also have substance abuse or commit suicide at a young age or their relationships break down. And so when you look at success in its entirety, not just through a single lens of their performance on a court or how much money that they have on paper, what we start to see is that when we are optimistic, when we see meaning and purpose, when we have social connection, it leads to greater levels of success across the board.

**Adam Grant** (3:39)
I also have to wonder about the upper bound on that. So Barry Schwartz and I wrote a paper years ago on the too much of a good thing effect and how across pretty much every domain of positive psychology we could find, you could overdo it. And the work that comes to mind right here is Shigeo Ishii's on quote unquote being too happy, where he finds that, I think you probably know this research better than I do, but my recollection of it is on a to 10 scale, people who score an 8 on happiness on average are more successful even financially than people who score a 6, but that the 8s are actually better off than the 10s. And I think about a 10 on happiness and I think about complacency. I think about I love my life so much that I'm just enjoying the present and I'm not setting goals for the future.