Poorly planned and stressful vacations eliminate the positive benefit of time away. The less the stress, the more likely you will experience a positive benefit from the time off. A positive, well-managed vacation can make you happier and less stressed, and you can return with more energy at work and with more meaning in your life.

Shawn Achor

Our daily decisions and habits have a huge impact upon both our levels of happiness and success.

Shawn Achor

The greatest competitive advantage in the modern economy is a positive and engaged brain.

Shawn Achor

You've probably noticed how when someone says hello or smiles at you, your automatic reaction is to say hello or smile back.

Shawn Achor

The research says that being successful doesn't automatically make you happier, but being happier - being more positive - makes you more successful.

Shawn Achor

Smart vacations lead to greater happiness and energy at work and, therefore, greater productivity, intelligence, and resilience.

Shawn Achor

Turnover can be one of the most expensive problems at a company.

Shawn Achor

When people exercise, we talk about endorphins, but endorphins are just short-term. The reason why exercise is valuable is it trains your brain to believe, 'My behavior matters,' which is optimism.

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

I'd love it if every company could give raises to the average worker for doing good work.

Shawn Achor

We know that recognition and intrinsic motivation are important to our success, but the key is finding ways to effectively operationalize them.

Shawn Achor

You spend money on Internet connection for your employees. Why not spend money on the energy that fuels their brains?

Shawn Achor

If you've ever tried to start up the habit of early-morning exercise, you have probably encountered how easy it is to get derailed by too much choice.

Shawn Achor

For me, meditation's hard because I feel like I have developed 'cultural attention-deficit disorder,' where, because we have so much stimulation, I feel like I have trouble focusing on things for very long. So when I try to meditate, my brain gets so scattered.

Shawn Achor

The more we can lower or even eliminate the activation energy for our desired actions, the more we enhance our ability to jump-start positive change.

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

We not only need to work happy, we need to work at being happy.

Shawn Achor

To be truly engaged at work, your brain needs periodic breaks to gain fresh perspective and energy.

Shawn Achor

Traveling the world can be an amazing - and even better - a happy experience. You just have to do it the right way.

Shawn Achor

Joy makes us want to invest more deeply in the people around us. It makes us want to learn more about our communities. It makes us want to be able to find ways of being able to make this a better external world for all of us.

Shawn Achor

The decision to use recognition as an on-the-spot bonus instead of merely pay increases is a fascinating one, because pay increases can create new mental anchors for how much the person feels happy earning, whereas the social recognition program is ongoing, unexpected, and harder to form a mental anchor around.

Shawn Achor