Name: Shawn Achor's Unexpected Definition of Happiness | SuperSoul Sessions | Oprah Winfrey Network
Uploaded: 2026-03-02T20:52:54.000Z
Duration: 1 min 46 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

I spent 12 years at Harvard studying happiness.

Gerund

I was actually at the Divinity School before getting into this, studying Christian and Buddhist ethics.

Past simple

And one of the ways that we defined happiness, which I think is so important is we didn't define happiness as pleasure, which is so quick and so short and it's over.

We defined happiness as the joy you feel moving towards your potential.

If you're taking notes, write that one down because that's important.

Happiness is the joy you feel moving towards your potential journey.

Joy is something you can experience even when life is not pleasurable, right?

Even in the midst of a long run when your legs are burning, you can still feel joy.

You can feel it working long hours of project or waking up at 1 and 2 and 3 in the morning with a little one year old named Leo.

You can still feel joy even with not high levels of pleasure.

And even in the midst of childbirth, you can have high levels of joy even when it's not a pleasurable experience.

What we've been finding is people are afraid of happiness.

They're afraid of happiness because they think we'll stagnate or we'll be blind.

That if I'm happy now, I won't keep fighting as hard.

If I'm happy now, I won't push as hard to make a better world.

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.

I'm excited to give you an update about our own YouTube channel.

They're the kind of videos that will make you look at life differently.

They may even make you laugh a little bit.

So here's just a taste of some of what you'll see.

Subscribe to the own channel today and we'll see you on YouTube.

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Shawn Achor's Unexpected Definition of Happiness | SuperSoul Sessions | Oprah Winfrey Network

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