Name: Shawn Achor Keynote at the 2018 Texas Conference for Women
Uploaded: 2026-01-31T00:55:13.000Z
Duration: 3 min 18 s
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What all this research was about was the idea that happiness alone.

Happiness can't be something you do alone, in isolation or in competition.

So I think the reason I want to show you that experiment is because I think it means we've been studying you wrong.

As I look at you now, there's no wires connecting any of your brains.

Here's your intelligence, your creativity, your athleticism, your obesity, your depression, all these different things.

We look at them in isolation as individuals.

But if I want to test you on creativity, what we do is we put you into a lab.

For four decades, this is what we've done.

Put you in a lab by yourself and ask you how many uses of a brick you can think of in a five minute period of time.

But everyone knows you're more creative when you're around certain people in your life, you're funnier when you're around certain people in your life.

But we put you in a room full of higher introverts, you act like a pseudo extrovert within that group.

What we're finding is in the midst of this, all these things we thought we could test for individually like on an ACT or sat, or things we could test for individually as personality traits or psychology.

We're missing out on the entire ecosystem of potential that predicted the height of your actual potential.

What we looked at and the reason I want to show you this is there's no wires connecting any of our brains.

But what it means is our brains are wirelessly connected through these mirroring systems, which means that we need to be able to not create self help versions of happiness.

We need to find a way of creating happiness as an interconnected community.

I want to tell you the two studies that started all this for me, that start big potential, the first one sounds boring, but

And I think the most powerful study that's come out in the past century, what we found is two researchers out in Virginia found that if you're looking at a mountain you need to climb in front of you.

If you're viewing that mountain by yourself, your brain perceives a mountain that is 10 to 20% steeper than a mountain of the same height you perceive while standing next to a friend who's going to climb it with you.

If you're looking a hill you need to climb by yourself, your brain shows you a picture of a mountain 10 to 20% steeper.

Than a mountain of the same height you perceive while standing next to a friend who's going to climb it with you.

That's not just the physical barriers in front of us.

That's finding a way of overcoming depression and anxiety.

That's finding a way of being able to pursue equal pay.

That's finding a way of being able to be successful within our lives in the midst of our family and the other obligations we have within our life.

As we're looking at those hills, if we're looking at them by ourselves, if it's exhausting in the midst of the political and economic changes we see.

But the more you surround yourself with people like this, turns out those opportunities change your response to that world.

I did an article that you can find online with the Harvard Business Review testing what happens when you have individuals come together in a group like this.

And we did it on the conferences for women.

And what we found is that for people that had signed up for a conference, so it's take any selection bias out.

People who had signed up but not yet been to a conference, comparing them in the same economic period of time to people who had been to a conference over the next year period of time.

It turns out the people had come who met other people who realized that they weren't alone in these processes and learned from one another.

It turns out that your likelihood of promotion doubled and likelihood of pay increase of more than 10% tripled over the next year period of time.

It doesn't guarantee a promotion or a raise, but it significantly increases the likelihood of doing so.

Happiness and success must be an interconnected pursuit.