Can We Really Become Happier With the Happiness Advantage?

     When we all watched the video Ms. Fletcher showed us, the author of The Happiness Advantage, Shawn Achor, talked about his studies on positive psychology I was curious if it could actually work. My skepticism helped me decided to pick this book for book club. Honestly, when I first started reading the book, I didn't believe anything he said. He made it seem like if I follow each principle he talked about, then I would become happy. He would talk about all his experiences trying to teach people his seven principles of positive psychology and I just couldn't accept all the facts. It seemed too easy. In addition, he stated that being positive would fuel success and help with performance at work or school. I was already a negative person and I was doing fine. In my mind, being positive just hurt me because I would get my hopes up,but then something bad would happen and I would be disappointed.
     However, during one of the weeks we were reading our books I became very depressed and unhappy. So I decided to read the book to see if it could help. As I was reading, the things Achor was talking about made more sense to me. The people he was describing as negative, I could totally relate to. After that realization I decided to see if some of his principles and techniques worked. For example, one of his principles was The Tetris Effect. He stated that people needed to train their minds to think how they wanted to and eventually our brains will adapt. One technique he talked about that would help make someone more positive was every day write three good things that happened. I decided to try it out and it actually helped me. Eventually I saw positive things around me without trying to look for them and I felt happier. I was surprised that it actually worked. When I finished the book, I decided that I would try and follow every principle. I'm not sure if it is going to work, but it's worth a try.
     The only problem I see and have already experienced is the effort to try and change how I look at myself and at the world. It's hard to think of the positive when there is so much negative surrounding me. To think positive and truly be happy, we have to really try. Achor changed the way I thought about the Happiness Advantage and I believe if that if someone really tries and follow each principle then it is possible they can become truly happy.

The Power of our Surroundings

For my book, I chose to read The Genius in All Of Us by David Shenk since I have lately wondered how I could increase my mind's capacity to absorb information. What especially intrigues me about this book is that it uses many examples of how our environment that we find ourselves in can play such a crucial role in molding the various aspects of our lifes. Such examples include the rats maze study, the great Ted Williams and his vigorous drive to excel in baseball, and Mozart's coming of age with a musically brilliant father who taught him at a very early age. Most of our culture thinks of talent as being something that is genetically inherited which Shenk continuously disproves. From what I have experienced in my life, I know this is definitely not accurate as I am the first in my family to take more than one AP class. 

While reading about the many different aspects of the environment that can shape our personalities (family, socio-economic levels, and more importantly friends), I was reminded of two important aspects of my life, that is I am the only male presence in my family and I had watched several hours of PBS cartoons when I was young. Because of the life lessons and educational themes of PBS programming, I probably gained much of my influence on my impressionable mind for love of learning from the channel, not to mention the negative effects such as my limited concentration that Nicholas Carr explained in The Shallows.
Throughout The Genius in All of Us, Shenk lists the many areas that one's mind has to go through and exerprience to increase it's potential to master a particular subject as a result of different environments. The way in which he list  them really helped me organize my trains of thought. One segment that I enjoyed reading was in Chapter 7 when Shenk explains the different keys to achieving a great mind: believing, supporting, pacing/persisting,  and embracing failures. Of course, many people already know what it takes to triumph in today's world, but he does an excellent job in tying how these different ideas can produce an extraordinary individual. For me, this is going to take an extraordinary amount of time as I am still in love with television's medium but reading this has just inspired me more in regards to achieving many educational goals, especially in word problems for AP Calculus.

Gene Do Not Define Who We Are

     I read David Shenk's book "The Genius in All of Us" and interestingly Shenk argues that genes do not make up who we are and this contradicts what I knew growing up. Shenk discards this fact by stating "talent is not a thing, but a process". I have usually thought as talent as a unique attribute that an individual has been born with such as a remarkable basketball player, amazing singer, talent to remember things and so on. However, Shenk describes the work of the psychologist Anders Ericsson, who wondered if he could train an ordinary person to perform extraordinary feats of memory. When Eric­sson began working with a young man identified as S.F., his subject could, like most of individuals, hold only seven numbers in his short-term memory. By the end of the study, S.F. could correctly recall an astonishing 80-plus digits. With the right kind of mental discipline, Ericsson and his co-­investigator concluded, “there is seemingly no limit to memory performance.” The work of Anders Ericssons reveals that talents can be taught and worked instead of being a unique and born gift. David Shenk also discards the sayings "he gets it from me", "he is just like me", and "I wonder where they get that from". Shenk believes that a person is molded by the environment that the individual is around. According to Shenk's novel, “It turns out that the genetic instructions themselves are influenced by other inputs,”. “Genes are constantly activated and deactivated by environmental stimuli, nutrition, hormones, nerve impulses and other genes.” That means there can be no guaranteed genetic windfalls, or fixed genetic limits, bestowed at the moment of conception. Instead there is a continually unfolding interaction between our heredity and our world, a process that may be in our control.

     What do you think? Do you think that people are born with unique talents or are talents, as Shenk puts it, a process and can be developed through training? 

Okay. And Now This.

                                 In The Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell discusses a time period in American history (during the 1800s) where people who were born in it were more likely to succeed. He proves this by showing that a significant portion of the list of the 75 richest people of all time (everything was adjusted for current USD in billions) were born within nine years of each other. Also, most hockey players are better off being born earlier in the year because they are the oldest and most mature they can be for their own year. Lastly, he talks about how Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and many others who were involved with the new wave of computers were born within the same time. Special factors were incorporated into each time period and only a few lucky ones were able to act upon them.

Reading this has made me wonder: What are some special factors that may currently exist in our society today? Ones that if we are lucky enough to take a chance on them, we'll be able to one day be called the outliers? 

What do you gals think? 

Oh, who am I kidding? Nobody will respond to this. But I don't blame them. I wouldn't either. :)

What Mindset Do I Have?

It seems as though all that have read can all agree that Carol S. Dweck, PhD, is bias in her views in Mindset.  Though I can go on and on about how she repeatedly wrote the same thing throughout the book, I can argue that some of the examples she mentions are relatable.  The stories she included about school applied to me since I do care about my grades.  With a fixed mindset, one would receive an F on an assignment or a test and give up.  They feel labeled by a single score.  Those with a growth mindset, as Carol Dweck is promoting, will learn from their mistakes and try harder next time.  I do find myself feeling disappointed with certain scores that I am not happy with, but I find it impossible to just give up.  Another relatable example is what she called "The Low-Effort Syndrome" which applied to students that tried to portray themselves as using as little effort as possible.  In a fixed mindset, a person strives to prove they are better rather than become better through hard work.  

So do I have a fixed or growth mindset?  I do at times feel discouraged when my scores are not up to my expectation and I feel as though I have tried my hardest.  At the same time, I still keep trying harder and harder when I don't succeed and I have no intention of proving anything to anybody regarding my intellectual abilities.  I am not certain what mindset I have because Dweck speaks as though you can only be one or the other.  She never mentions a balance between the two.  It is hard to have a complete growth mindset as it is hard to have a complete fixed mindset.  Though one may seem as if they are completely one or the other, a person with a growth mindset has probably been discouraged at some point and a person with a fixed mindset has probably felt the need to put in extra effort to achieve what they desire.  Dweck has opened my eyes to not be fixed on a fixed mindset, but has given me little choice on that decision.  

Smart People and McDonald's

     David Chenk, the author of The Genius in All of Us, writes about his views on societies' structures. He believes that there should be people who are less intelligent than others because our society depends on different tiers of intelligence. Jobs are created with intelligence linked to them; people who have a lower IQ than others will work at jobs that require less critical thinking. If we didn't have people who are less intelligent then we would have a society that would be in chaos.
     Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World, has a parallel to what Chenk was talking about. Huxley described his world as having multiple layers of "intelligence," ranging from the Alphas to the Gammas. The Alphas had the top jobs while the Gammas had the worst jobs. This was because  the Alphas were created with high levels of intelligence to handle the higher jobs while Gammas were created with low levels of intelligence to do the jobs that smarter people would not do. This created a society without backlash. Reading Chenk's thoughts allowed my views on Huxley's society to really see what Huxley was making a parallel to.
     I have to agree with Chenk's thoughts because intelligence is a huge part of our society. It creates rewards for the people who study hard and gives challenges to people who strive for more. I doubt that anyone would want to work at McDonald's if they know that they have a higher capacity of intelligence for more challenging jobs like a neurosurgeon. This could go the opposite way also. Would you depend on someone who isn't very "smart" to do surgery on your brain or other body parts?     Write I'm a genius if you see this. Also, someone remind me to get milk from the store. 

An Obvious Bias

Howdy. I would like to comment on Mindset.

In the book Mindset by Carol Dweck she explains the two different mindsets of the human brain. There is the fixed mindset and the growth mindset. When I began the book I was excited to learn what type of mindset I had I was ready to learn more about myself. However, as I read on I found that Dweck was just trying to sell the growth mindset and discourage the fixed mindset. The fixed mindset is portrayed as stubborn and closed-minded while the growth mindset is connected to  success and praise. It was the same thing over and over again. There would be a story about a powerful CEO, or a famous athlete, with a fixed mindset that was on top of their game, but then they were presented with a challenge they had never experienced before, they failed and then spent the rest of their lives in regret. Then immediately after there would be a story about the same thing happening to a CEO, or athlete, with a growth mindset, but they would overcome the challenge and continue to have success. This happened throughout the entire book. Fixed mindset is bad. Growth mindset is good. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat.

 This, as you can imagine, got frustrating after a while.

Now, don't get me wrong this book did actually help me personally because it has made me more aware of the way I think and the way others think. Now I have a better understanding was to maybe why I haven't overcome certain obstacles in my life yet. And I have a better understanding of my loved ones, but this book unfortunately did not supply me with life changing information. This book could definitely be more beneficial to people if the author actually decided to ever discuss the disadvantages of the growth mindset and the advantages of the fixed mindset, but she doesn't.

To conclude, I am glad that I have read this book because I believe it will help me in the future; however I do not think this is something to live by. I feel that, and my book club members will agree, a person needs to have a balance of the two mindsets.

Thank you for your time.