The Happiness Advantage (Speaker and Audience)

        Shawn Achor is the author of an international bestselling novel The Happiness Advantage published in 2010. In the year 1978, Achor was born in Waco, Texas in the month of March. His parents (does not say which was which) were a neuroscience professor and academics advisor. He attended Harvard University for twelve years earning a Bachelor of the Arts and studying people’s behavior towards their everyday lives. During his career, he has travelled around the world to over fifty countries including Zimbabwe and China. Putting his experience to good use he wrote nineteen novels, a majority of them focused  on the strange yet compelling concept of happiness and how to get there. Currently, Achor lives in San Antonio, Texas with his wife Michelle Gielan and puts his skills to good use managing his company GoodThink Inc. and giving presentations for TED Talks.

        In the novel, Achor writes down his revelation of happiness as an idea or concept that does not belong to only one group or culture. His travels have shown him that people of all diverse backgrounds, for example, Chinese businessmen to  Zimbabwean villagers both want know what it is like to be truly happy. Achor kept this in mind as he created a list of seven principles that would teach his audience to better understand how to be happy and how spread it to others. He points out that success and happiness have been bound together. The audience believes that success alone will make them happy when in reality, it is actually reversed. During Achor’s attendance at Harvard, he noticed that students were usually unhappy, as they were stressed from the competition and large amount of work to do. It did not matter that they successfully made it to a prestigious college as the students themselves believed that they had to continue this rate of success in order to be happy. Happiness is the missing ingredient that will lead to a person’s success because it will improve their performance and increase the number of their achievements. As a positive psychologist, Achor infused his desire to solve the puzzle of happiness inside this novel so that the readers themselves can find their own answers and definition of that complicated word.
-Mycah Reece