Before Happiness

the simple act of adding vantage points—changing your viewpoint as you evaluate your options—can significantly increase your ability to see new valuable details, which, in turn, broadens your perspective and helps you find a broader range

Positive genius is not about optimism or pessimism, or seeing the glass as half empty or half full. Because in truth, half empty and half full are not the only possible options. Both optimists and pessimists are so focused on how to interpret the single glass in front of them, they can miss the fact that there is a third, equally true reality—a pitcher of water on the table to refill the glass. Positive geniuses, on the other hand, can see the full pitcher, and with it a greater range of opportunities, possibilities, and paths to success.

The smiley face has no eyes! It is blind happiness. This is exactly what’s wrong with most people’s understanding of happiness in the workplace. Happiness is not about being blind to the negatives in our environment; it’s about believing we have the power to do something about them.

They are the people who continually find new possibilities to pounce on. They are the ones who discover ways around the obstacles that seem most insurmountable, the ones who solve the problems that seem most intractable.
It’s not that they don’t see the negative realities in the world, it’s that they also see they have the ability to do something about them. They can see the tragedy in the earthquake in Japan or understand the difficulty in treating breast cancer or recognize the racial injustices in our educational system—but they are also the ones who search for ways to help the survivors or raise money for medical research or continue to work to invent a more fair system.

Other people are experts at creating positive realities. These are the people who seem to have the Midas touch at work, the people who turn every opportunity, every relationship, every setback to gold.

Your IQ teaches you what you need to do, emotional intelligence shows how, and social intelligence illuminates with whom.

While the human brain receives eleven million pieces of information every second from our environment, it can process only forty bits per second, which means it has to choose what tiny percentage of this input to process and attend to, and what huge chunk to dismiss or ignore.1 Thus your reality is a choice; what you choose to focus on shapes how you perceive and interpret your world.

classes, and I was in love with all of them. But as I slowly started realizing that my relationships with them weren’t going as well as I’d hoped (for instance, my parents had to pay the girls at the end of the date), I decided—after observing the successes of Ariel in The Little Mermaid—that I would need to become part of their world. So I asked my dad if I could be part of one his classroom demonstrations. He was so excited that his son might be following in his footsteps that he didn’t stop to wonder if I had ulterior motives—as indeed I did.

mere six years later, I willingly volunteered for another neuroscience experiment, which, though of course I had no way of knowing it at the time, would ultimately lead to the writing of this book. By that point my father was a professor at Baylor University. All of my babysitters happened to be students from his introductory psychology class

Before I was born, my father, who was a neuroscientist at UC Irvine at the time, made me an unwilling subject of one of the very first EEG experiments conducted on an unborn child. He and his colleagues hooked up electrodes to the belly of my very pregnant (and clearly very patient) mom to see if they could detect and analyze my brain wave patterns. The tests failed (I’m not sure what that says about my brain), but some influences in our lives run deep. Even before birth, I was wired for a love of psychology and science.