Top 70 Shawn Achor Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Happiness inspires productivity.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes, Productivity Quotes

2. “Your brain at positive is 31% more productive than your brain at negative, neutral or stressed.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

3. “Happiness is a mindset for your journey, not the result of your destination.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

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

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

5. “Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it’s the realization that we can.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Life Quotes, Happiness Quotes

6. “The way we define happiness is the joy you feel striving toward your potential.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

7. “Each one of us is like that butterfly the Butterfly Effect. And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations our families and our communities.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

8. “One of the most powerful forces in human nature is our belief that change is possible.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

9. “Happiness is the precursor to success.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

10. “You have to train your brain to be positive just like you work out your body.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Quotes About the Brain

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

— Shawn Achor

12. “Happiness is such an incredible advantage in our life. When the human brain is positive, our intelligence rises, we stop diverting resources to think about anxiety.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Life Quotes, Happiness Quotes

13. “We become more successful when we are happier and more positive.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

14. “The best leaders are the ones who show their true colors not during the banner years but during times of struggle.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Leadership Quotes

15. “Successful people see adversity as a stepping stone rather than a stumbling block.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

16. “Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

17. “The absence of disease is not health.”

— Shawn Achor

18. “When a manager openly expresses his faith in an employee’s skill, he doesn’t just improve mood and motivation; he actually improves their likelihood of succeeding.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Leadership Quotes

19. “Waiting to be happy limits our brain’s potential for success, whereas cultivating positive brains makes us more motivated, efficient, resilient, creative, and productive, which drives performance upward.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

20. “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

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

21. “The greatest competitive advantage in our modern economy is a positive and engaged brain.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

22. “Focusing on the good isn’t just about overcoming our inner grump to see the glass half full. It’s about opening our minds to the ideas and opportunities that will help us be more productive, effective, and successful at work and in life.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

23. “Beliefs are so powerful because they dictate our efforts and actions.”

— Shawn Achor

24. “It’s hard to find happiness after success if the goalposts of success keep changing.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

25. “Study after study shows that happiness precedes important outcomes and indicators of thriving.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

26. “If we study what is merely average, we will remain merely average.”

— Shawn Achor

27. “The fastest way to disengage an employee is to tell him his work is meaningful only because of the paycheck.”

— Shawn Achor

28. “Most people keep waiting on happiness, putting off happiness until they’re successful or until they achieve some goal, which means we limit both happiness and success. That formula doesn’t work.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

29. “Positivity is such a high predicator of success rates.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

30. “Habits are like financial capital – forming one today is an investment that will automatically give out returns for years to come.”

— Shawn Achor

31. “Perhaps the most accurate term for happiness, then, is the one Aristotle used: eudaimonia, which translates not directly to “happiness” but to “human flourishing.”

— Shawn Achor

32. “Research shows you get multiple tasks done faster if you do them one at a time. It also decreases stress and raises happiness.”

— Shawn Achor

33. “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

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

34. “Without action, knowledge is often meaningless. As Aristotle put it, to be excellent we cannot simply think or feel excellent, we must act excellently.”

— Shawn Achor

35. “Happiness is actually an individual choice, even in the midst of negative circumstances. It’s not something our employers can give to us, though they can limit and influence that choice.”

— Shawn Achor

36. “As we got more interested in time management and productivity, we lost the individual, and with that individual loss, we lost happiness as well. So I think the world has actually been malnourished as we’ve focused so much on productivity and ignored happiness and meaning to our own detriment.”

— Shawn Achor

37. “Without action, knowledge is often meaningless.”

— Shawn Achor

38. “The contents of the glass don’t matter; what’s more important is to realize there’s a pitcher of water nearby. In other words, we have the capacity to refill the glass, or to change our outlook.”

— Shawn Achor

39. “Afterward, I jokingly asked Salim why the children of Soweto were so weird. “They see schoolwork as a privilege,” he replied, “one that many of their parents did not have.” When I returned to Harvard two weeks later, I saw students complaining about the very thing the Soweto students saw as a privilege. I started to realize just how much our interpretation of reality changes our experience of that reality.”

— Shawn Achor

40. “The person we have the greatest power to change is ourselves.”

— Shawn Achor

41. “You can study gravity forever without learning how to fly.”

— Shawn Achor

42. “By changing our mindset and habits, we can actually dramatically change the course of life, improve intelligence, productivity, improve the quality of our lives, and improve every single education and business outcome.”

— Shawn Achor

43. “When we encounter an unexpected challenge of threat the only way to save ourselves is to hold on tight to the people around us and not let go.”

— Shawn Achor

44. “When we are happy – when our mindset and mood are positive – we are smarter, more motivated, and thus more successful. Happiness is the center, and success revolves around it.”

— Shawn Achor

45. “Perhaps the most accurate term for happiness, then, is the one Aristotle used: eudaimonia, which translates not directly to “happiness” but to “human flourishing.” This definition really resonates with me because it acknowledges that happiness is not all about yellow smiley faces and rainbows. For me, happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential.”

— Shawn Achor

46. “When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism.”

— Shawn Achor

47. “Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time.”

— Shawn Achor

Featured in: Happiness Quotes

48. “The Tetris Effect – When our brains get stuck in a pattern that focuses on stress, negativity, and failure, we set ourselves up to fail. This principle teaches us how to retrain our brains to spot patterns of possibility, so we can see – and seize – opportunity wherever we look.”

— Shawn Achor

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

— Shawn Achor

50. “This is a very important study because it shows that when we perceive a reality in which success is likely, that success become a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

— Shawn Achor