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The Happiness Advantage: Introduction

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Excerpt from The Happiness Advantage…

If you observe the people around you, you’ll find most individuals follow a formula that has been subtly or not so subtly taught to them by their schools, their company, their parents, or society. That is: If you work hard, you will become successful, and once you become successful, then you’ll be happy. This pattern of belief explains what most often motivates us in life. We think: If I just get that raise, or hit that next sales target, I’ll be happy. If I can just get that next good grade, I’ll be happy. If I lose that five pounds, I’ll be happy. And so on. Success first, happiness second.

The only problem is that this formula is broken.

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About the Author

Shawn Achor, author of The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work, spent over a decade at Harvard University where he won numerous distinguished teaching awards for his work. He graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and earned a Masters from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics. In 2006, he was Head Teaching Fellow for ‘Positive Psychology,’ the most popular course at Harvard at the time. In 2007, Shawn founded Good Think Inc. to share his research with a wider population. When the global economy collapsed in 2008, Shawn was immediately called in as an expert by the world’s largest banks to help restart forward progress. Subsequently, Shawn has spoken in 45 countries to a wide variety of audiences: bankers on Wall Street, students in Dubai, CEOs in Zimbabwe. Shawn’s research on happiness and human potential have received attention from the Harvard Business Review, New York Times, Forbes, CNN, and NPR. To read Shawn Anchor’s full biography, click here.

Do You Make Things Happen or Just Fill Time?

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Innovative gadgets and mobile devices have brought great ease and efficiency to the workplace, but I’m convinced they’ve also become huge time-wasters. How often do you spend hours answering email and think you’ve actually accomplished something? Are you spending time in endless meetings to avoid actually making decisions? Do you have beautiful ‘to-do’ lists, but don’t actually finish anything?

I have 5 suggestions to help you quit your wasting time to boost your productivity. After all, you don’t want to get to the end of your life and realize your only real accomplishment was sending and receiving 10 billion email messages:

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About the Author

Phil Cooke is a television producer and media consultant at Cooke Pictures in Burbank, California. His new book is ‘Jolt! Get the Jump on a World That’s Constantly Changing.‘. Find out more at philcooke.com.

Are You a Good Fit for Potential Employers?

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Determining if you are a good fit for an employer and vice-versa is not always as hard as it might seem. As I describe in my book Career Mapping: Charting Your Course in the New World of Work, you first need to have decided that you want to work in the industry in which the company does business.

If you are a functional expert, say in HR or finance, you might tend to think your skills are transferrable and can be applied anywhere. That might be true, but you need to understand and appreciate the context you are working in. Human Resources in a consumer goods company, which might be product and sales oriented, is quite different from an industrial company where manufacturing plants and unions are the order of the day. You need to like, or at least want to learn, about the business the company is in. As you move through your career, your industry, as well as functional knowledge are what allow you to move up the ladder.

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About the Author

Ginny Clarke is an expert in talent and career management, executive coaching, and diversity and inclusion in the workplace. She has recruited C-suite executives and corporate directors, and coached numerous executives and professionals. She is widely respected as a thought leader and practitioner of recruitment and retention strategies that go beyond traditional definitions of diversity. She offers provocative, unconventional remedies for organizations seeking to leverage their global workforce. Having been a senior executive herself, Ginny is credible and confident. Her candor, intellect and results-oriented approach appeal to those committed to growth and change. To ready Ginny Clarke’s full biography, click here.

Recruiter-IZE Your Resume and Finally Get some Interviews

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A friend of mine was angry. After a decade of writing screenplays with no success, after reading books on writing and submitting and formatting, her mantle was not only Oscar less, she had no mantle. But what got her mad was meeting a woman in her SPIN class who worked for a household name film studio and told her the truth.

“They not only don’t read most of the scripts,” my friend reported, umbrage front and center, but the ones they do read are read by entry level kids, who, get this, are trying to get their own scripts read, so of course they reject mine. What an insane system!”

Not really, I thought to myself. The system works fine. No shortage of movies on my On Demand system. And more on the way. I know this because my success has been in the recruiting world, and I know that resume writing drives people as crazy as the movie writing business does for my friend.

Because most of what you have been told is either not true or no longer true about resumes.

And why would you know this? I ran a Google search about ‘resume writing’ and found 26 million items! And they all offer the same old bromides. ‘Make it pleasing to the eye’, ‘your goal is to avoid being at the bottom of the pile of resumes in Personnel!’ Seriously? When were these books written? Who was President? There are no ‘Piles’ of resumes in a digital world, and ‘personnel’ has been renamed Human Resources about a generation or two ago. And you can’t be ‘pleasing to the eye’ when everyone is sending the resume via the same Outlook format. These books, no doubt relevant in their day, are fecklessly reprinted every time there is a recession because we know people will be dusting off resumes and looking for an edge. But to give the same well worn advice now that technology has changed both the purpose of resumes and the delivery system, is to literally cost people interviews rather than help them acquire them.

Submitting resumes is my lifeblood as recruiter. If I am out of touch with how it’s done, I starve. And that just isn’t going to happen! So let me help you RecruiterIZE your resume:

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About the Author

Danny Cahill is the author of Harper’s Rules: A Recruiter’s Guide to Finding a Dream Job and the Right Relationship. A popular keynote speaker and recruiter, he is the owner of Hobson Associates, one of America’s largest search firms. He is also the founder of www.AccordingtoDanny.com, an online training and mentoring company dedicated to enhancing the skills and jumpstarting the spirits of recruiters worldwide. For more information, please visit www.harpersrules.com or www.hobsonassoc.com. To read Danny’s complete biography, click here.

Getting to the Top: Strategies for Career Success

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How do you know if a road will get you where you want to go if you don’t know where you are headed? You need a destination in mind to be able to evaluate and select a route that will get you there. Similarly, a career strategy enables career success.

Career success starts with understanding your long-term goal. Most people have an idea about the next step in their career, their next job: I want a promotion; I want to be a marketing manager or a financial analyst. That’s a great start but what is your long-term objective? I find in interviewing that many people are uncomfortable answering the question, “Where do you see yourself in 5-10 years?”

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About the Author

Kathryn Ullrich heads Kathryn Ullrich Associates, a Silicon Valley executive search firm, and Alumni Career Services for UCLA Anderson School of Management. She is the author of Getting to the Top: Strategies for Career Success (2010), and may be reached through www.GettingToTheTop.com.