Let me just start by saying I've been talking about this a lot and I think sometimes the message gets a bit misconstrued. So I want to start by saying that stress, chronic or extreme stress, is extremely bad for you. And I think we all know this, but the research behind it is actually surprising how broadly detrimental stress can be. It'll increase your blood pressure, increase your risk of heart disease, decrease your sex drive, it will mess up with your appetite, it will make your immune system less resilient. So stress is bad. If you look at your cortisol levels and they're chronically elevated, it's basically going to kill you over time. So I want to start there.
But then the realization from this exploration in sports psychology was that going around in life trying to reach a stress level of zero is not productive. Clearly for two reasons. One, it's impossible. It's human condition that we will feel stress and anxiety in our lives. Second, this is what this curve shows here. It's called the Yerkes-Dodson curve. Stress can increase your performance up to an optimal point. So another way of phrasing this is to say that optimal performance does not occur at a stress level of zero. You need some activation. Sports psychologists like to reframe the term from stress to activation. And reframing is part of the way that you can improve that curve for yourself and we're talking about leadership here and I've been mainly talking about self-improvement, which is a big part of leadership, but for organizations as well. If you're a leader, you're setting the goals, do you set them super aggressive, super easy, somewhere in between? Just remember that optimal performance does not occur at a stress level of zero. Up to a certain level, having some activation, some little bit of performance anxiety will increase your performance. Dr. Daniel Zimet said, 'Look, the top athletes that he trains in Major League Baseball in the NFL, Olympic athletes, they're all pretty neurotic and they all get nervous at key moments in their sports and when they're, you know, the outcome is on the line.' So, I found that liberating. Of the entire book to me, this concept was one of the most important. And I stopped stressing about stressing and started working on ways to manage this curve, to improve it by mindfulness, by repetition, by using rest to increase stress resilience and also applying that to managing an organization.
One of the things that motivated you was self-awareness in terms of stress and how that was weighing on you. And you know, stress in our work environment is connected to our feelings of happiness and whether or not we feel like we're successful. And one of the most interesting areas of the book that really grabbed me was some of the research that you referenced around the relationship between happiness and success. And that, you know, some people might feel that one comes before the other. But can you help us dive into what you learned about the relationship between success and happiness?
Shawn Achor at Harvard has done fascinating research on this and you end up reversing the equation. So, if you ask people in surveys how happy they are and then you measure their performance after you took the survey, you'll find a positive correlation between people's levels of happiness and subsequent success. Now, that's not how we think about it at all. We think every day, and I think the same, too. We think I got to reach this goal and then I'll be happy. But Shawn Achor is saying, 'Look, it's the opposite. Happy people perform better.' So, that's what I say in the chapter that say reverse the equation. And then you get down to, 'Okay, what does positive psychology have to say about what makes people happy or what makes people thrive?' And I use the word thrive as slightly different from happiness. But that's a whole area of research that I think underrated in business and that I make the case in the book has much more applications than we might think.
So, any takeaways for folks? I mean, obviously that it's so important to have that happiness and for people to feel like they're within an environment and a professional community where they can thrive and where they can grow. Any takeaways or advice for leaders on how to create those conditions in the first place?
Absolutely. I mean, I'm glad you asked. My favorite model in positive psychology was developed by Marty Seligman, one of the fathers of positive psychology. It's called PERMA. Now, Brett, I don't like acronyms and in finance and technology there are too many acronyms. In the book I tried not to use too many acronyms, but I love PERMA. It stands for P, positive emotions, E, engagement, R, relationships, M, meaning, and A, accomplishment. If as a leader you want to develop a culture where people have an ability to thrive and feel good about their work and be excited going to work, you need to focus on the PERMA.
You had mentioned in one of your answers just a moment ago the idea of goal-induced blindness. Can you help us understand that idea a little bit more? There's a great analogy in your book about climbing Mount Everest, which I thought was pretty illustrative.
Yeah, that analogy is from the literature in psychology. Psychologists are kind of a little obsessed with Mount Everest for some reason and there are lots of papers that study what happens on Mount Everest. It's interesting. But Brett, let me ask you. 100 gummies, four are poisoned. I challenge you to eat one and I'm going to give you a 100 million if you eat one. I don't mean to put you on the spot, but I kind of am, right? Would you eat it?
