Does the happiness principle work outside of school? Does it work in the adult world of job and career — in the daily grind?
When Sergey Brin and Larry Page started Google in 1998, they set a policy of hiring only the most brilliant applicants in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math).
Fifteen years later, Google decided it might be a good idea to evaluate the results of this policy.
A Washington Post article, “The surprising thing Google learned about its employees — and what it means for today’s students” (December 27, 2017), summarized what Google learned from Project Oxygen, the in-depth examination of its hiring practices.
Project Oxygen completely overturned the company’s understanding of the qualities that best predicted success in a high-tech business environment. Most notably, among the eight standout qualities of Google’s top employees, STEM expertise was dead last.
The top qualities that augured success at Google were “soft” skills. The researchers found that the most successful Google employees:
Are good coaches
Empower the team and do not micromanage
Express interest in and concern for the other team members’ success and personal well-being
Are productive and results-oriented
Are good communicators — they listen and share information
Help others with their career development
Have a clear vision and strategy for the team
Have key technical skills that help them advise the team
A follow-up study by Google on the defining qualities of its most productive research teams (Project Aristotle, 2016) confirmed these results. In the Post article, Cathy N. Davidson, a professor in the graduate school at CUNY, described the findings:
“Project Aristotle shows that the best teams at Google exhibit a range of soft skills: equality, generosity, curiosity toward the ideas of your teammates, empathy, and emotional intelligence. And topping the list: emotional safety. No bullying. To succeed, each and every team member must feel confident speaking up and making mistakes. They must know they are being heard.”
Davidson cited a survey of 260 companies conducted by the National Association of Colleges and Employers. The study, which included industry giants Chevron and IBM, found that recruiters ranked communication skills among the top three qualities companies look for in job applicants. “They prize both an ability to communicate with one’s fellow workers and an aptitude for conveying the company’s product and mission outside the organization.”
What conclusions can we draw from these studies, about the best way to help our children succeed and be happy?
A common feature of the qualities that set the top Google employees apart is that they are “expansive.” That is, they foster a work environment where the employees are encouraged to expand their awareness to include others.
The qualities that the researchers identified as furthering success at Google and other top companies are the same qualities that the teachers in the Living Wisdom Schools expend tremendous energy to cultivate in the classroom, considering them essential to create a safe, nurturing, joyful learning environment for the children.
Oddly enough, the Google findings reflect the results of a vastly older body of studies conducted in the forest ashrams of ancient India.
For more than fifty years, the Living Wisdom Schools have pioneered a radical new approach to educating young children — an approach that empowers them to be happy while they excel in school and life.
In education today, there’s a quiet but powerful groundswell — a grassroots rebellion against the government-mandated “No Child Left Behind” and Core Curriculum initiatives that have hamstrung teachers, alienated students, and distorted the purpose of education by preventing children from receiving the best possible experience of school.
The Education for Life philosophy can be simply stated:
At school, the factor that most assuredly
promotes deep, engaged, lasting learning
is happiness.
Parents are often dumbfounded when they hear the Living Wisdom School teachers proclaim that a happy, arts-enriched, highly individualized curriculum promotes more efficient learning than the “academically rigorous” curricula offered by other schools.
They are nonplussed by the suggestion that the LWS curriculum gives children a deeper education because the teachers are encouraged to teach principles and review content with each student until they have a firm grasp on concepts before moving on, instead of skimming the surface of the subject matter in an ill-considered rush to demonstrate good test scores.
Young people who are subjected to a one-sided, academically overloaded curriculum are at risk not only of receiving a superficial education; they end up mentally and emotionally less well-prepared to succeed in high school and beyond. Perhaps most troubling, they are less likely to acquire important personal qualities that are defining among successful people.
One prospective parent, during a visit to LWS, protested, “But these kids can’t be learning — they’re too happy!”
Yet groundbreaking research has confirmed beyond any possibility of doubt that happiness and school success are intimately connected.
What are some of the qualities that we, as parents and teachers, should encourage in our children to prepare them for success in high school, college, and life?
Aside from the knowledge and skills required to succeed in a profession, surely it’s fair to suggest that there also needs to be a deep wanting to do worthwhile and wonderful things.
There has to be a confidence, self-knowledge, positive expectations, and an ability to work well with others — all qualities that must be deliberately nurtured. They cannot be imposed from without, nor will they magically appear as a side-effect of good grades and test scores.
These personal qualities, which are highly predictive of career success, cannot be nurtured by only trying to motivate kids to get good grades. Any motivation that grades and test scores provide will be superficial and will fail to touch their hearts. Worse, it may encourage a dependence on external recognition that can never be fully satisfied. After one test, there will always be another.
As will become clear in the chapters that follow, success and happiness come most reliably to those who are focused enthusiastically on the process — who are not postponing their happiness until some vaguely imagined future, but are able to rejoice in the expansion of their powers today.
When David Eby isn’t teaching music to children at the Living Wisdom School in Portland, Oregon, he’s a professional cellist with the Oregon Symphony and the Portland Cello Project. David teaches cello at Lewis and Clark College and is a Teaching Artist for the BRAVO Youth Orchestra. He also works with the El Sistema program, which brings classical music training to disadvantaged youth.
David lives in south Portland with his wife Madhavi, their daughter Caitlin, and their Manx cat, Maggie. (David invites you to visit his website where you can learn about his insights on meditation for musicians, and the spiritual healing power of music in our lives.)
David Eby has taught in the Living Wisdom Schools for more than fourteen years – initially for two years in Portland, then twelve years at the original school at Ananda Village, near Nevada City, California, and now he’s back in Portland teaching again.
Q: David, let’s have an informal conversation about the role of the arts in helping kids be happy and successful in school and in their lives. Have you given much thought to the positive role that the arts can play in a child’s development, especially during the important “Feeling Years” from age 6 to 12? Has it been a theme in your life, and in your daughter’s?
David: My daughter Caitlin is in sixth grade now, and she’s performing with the Pacific Youth Choir in Portland. They recently sang Mahler’s Third Symphony with the Oregon Symphony. It was a spectacular, high-powered event – Mahler can be pretty heavy, but she was moved to tears by the beauty of it.
She gets a great deal of joy from the arts – from music, theater, and writing – and she’s very passionate about it. She grew up in the Living Wisdom Schools, and next year she’ll enter the Arts and Communication Academy here in Portland. I’ve taken her to choir practice since she was a little one, and as a result she knows our entire choir repertoire inside and out. (laughs)
In my life, the arts have been an absolutely constant theme. I picked up the cello when I was six, and I knew right away, with a solid intuition – “This is my instrument!” Music was something that stayed with me throughout my childhood, and playing cello and singing took me to some incredible experiences in my earlier years.
It was during that time that my heart was most open, and through music I was able to experience something greater than myself, whether we call it a higher inspiration, God, or our own highest potential. The name we give it doesn’t matter, so long as we recognize the amazing things that music can do for us.
There are two aspects to music. There’s the purely physical, sonic experience, and then there’s the interior, subjective response.
The sonic experience is what the sound waves are doing to our brain. Many studies in recent years have shown that music, and especially playing an instrument, builds important connections between the two hemispheres of a child’s brain, and that when a child is having a musical experience, many areas of the brain become engaged. It’s not just a single part of the brain. Music touches a number of brain areas simultaneously, and when we’re performing, the whole brain lights up in a striking way that the scientists can observe on brain scans. The effect is also there when we listen to music, but to a lesser degree, and even when we imagine music that inspires us.
So there’s the purely physical level, and then there’s an energetic level. And what I mean by “energetic” is the effect that the sound waves produce that touches us in a deep way. It’s what happens when we say, “That piece really moved me.” Or, “It struck a chord with me. I really resonated with it.”
It’s something that we can safely say lies beyond our intellectual perception, or the simple effect of the sound waves on the physical body and brain. There’s something that music can awaken that’s deeper than a collection of beats and sound waves and chords.
Unfortunately, there’s a lot of music today, popular music, that is simply that – it’s just sounds and beats and rhythms and effects that are designed to be ear candy. It gets our energy moving and excites our emotions, but when it’s over it just dumps us back out on the curb again.
What intrigues me is a kind of music that does exactly the opposite, a music that bypasses the mind and draws us inward, into a oneness with something that’s greater than the little ego and that we recognize as being the highest part of ourselves.
Q: Are there levels upon levels of uplifting music – for example, music that can raise our spirits, and then music that can take us to an even higher plane?
David: Yes, I’m absolutely convinced of this. I coached at a music camp last week, where an amateur quartet played a Schubert piece, and it was really lovely. Schubert wrote some incredibly inspired pieces. Some of his songs have a powerful ability to cheer us up and make us smile and feel that life is good.
But I believe there are higher levels. Brahms said that he would contact a divine presence that was “superconscious” when he composed – he actually used that word – and that it was from there that he received his inspiration.
For me, music is a road map, or a kind of source code that can capture inspiration, and that captures the state of consciousness that the composers were able to enter and draw upon, and bring into their music.
We’re given these dots on a page, and when we perform it, there’s a big light that goes on somewhere on the scale of inspiration. And if you play the notes, and carefully tune in to the present moment, and if you’re very focused and receptive, you can get a taste or even become wholly immersed in what the composer experienced. And if the composer received it from a very high place, for example Handel’s Messiah, you can feel it touching your soul.
It’s like a prescription for bringing your consciousness up onto a happier plane. It starts with the realm of pure ideas, and then it works through energy to create a sonic vibration that transmits those ideas to a deep place in us.
For me, it’s one of the things in life, like nature, that can awaken a remembrance in us, of a beauty that lies within us all, and an understanding of where our truest fulfillment comes from.
Our greatest fulfillments can never ultimately come from anything material. When you hear music, can you put your finger on it? Can you capture it? It’s played, and then it goes away. It’s this thing that’s completely immaterial, and yet it’s one of the greatest gifts that God has given us, because it leads us inward, toward the inner kingdom where our universal birthright of happiness lies.
Q: As you were growing up, and in your career as a cellist, was there a point where you felt that there was a ceiling on the inspiration that you could tap into through the kind of music you were playing?
David: Yes. First of all, I can tell you that when I was in the Feeling Years from 6 to 12, I was a complete music snob! (laughs) My teacher actually had to pull me aside and say, “David, I’m afraid I have to give you an unsatisfactory grade, because your attitude has been really, really bad in music class.” And I wasn’t quite sassy enough to say, “Well, yeah, because the music we’re having to learn really sucks!” (laughs)
It was totally, totally uninspiring. But, at the same time, I remember being deeply moved by the folk songs of the Seventies, especially the tunes from Godspell and others that were being sung at the time. My Dad is a Presbyterian pastor, and I grew up in those surroundings, with an awareness of the inspiration of Spirit.
So yes, I had many experiences that reassured me: “As long as I have the music, everything will be okay.”
I had incredibly inspired experiences that carried me through high school. But then toward the end of college, after I had gone through a great deal of formal training, I woke up one day in a kind of panic state, wondering, “My gosh, what have I done?”
I thought, “I’ll end up playing in an orchestra surrounded by miserable musicians, of whom there a great many, and cynical, jaded, uninspired conductors, and an audience that’s dwindling, and music that for the most part isn’t inspiring at all.
There’s a lot of music that is inspired, but orchestras oftentimes have to program “new music” to win the grants that will support the more inspiring stuff. And it’s very unfortunate that in contemporary music we have a great deal to learn about inspiration. Right now, it’s seems that the more outrageous and atonal and banging and confused it is, the better the music is purported to be. There’s a lot of powerful music – but uplifting? – hm, I don’t think so.
So I put my career on hold when I was in my late twenties, and I went off in search of that lost inspiration. And, interestingly enough, I ended up actually finding it.
At first I was looking for a way to serve society through music, which I felt would be a heart-opening and fulfilling thing to do. My first attempt was when I joined a troupe of storytelling musicians who were addressing the needs of children in the Feeling Years that we’ve been talking about, from age 6 to 12. We would take stories and set them to music, and we would become the characters and act out the stories, like the Pied Piper of Hamlin.
I remember dressing up like the mayor of Hamlin – I would strap my cello to my body, and we would play and sing and enact the story. And for a long time I felt very inspired, because it really was serving the needs of young children who desperately need upliftment through the arts.
But then over time it turned out to be too much of an “art for art’s sake” kind of thing, with a precious kind of self-conscious flavor that sapped the feeling of expansion. So I bowed out and began working with the Suzuki Method, which is founded on a beautiful philosophy of creating children who won’t necessarily be professional musicians, but who will be human beings with beautiful hearts. And that was just an incredible experience, because there was a lot of wonderful material there.
But then I noticed that whenever I would go to a Suzuki conference, I would be surrounded by people who were ordinary music teachers who’d seized the opportunity to slap a button on their chest that said, “Hi, I’m a Suzuki teacher.” They weren’t looking for something that would be more deeply meaningful, in the way that I was.
Then, thank goodness, I found Ananda, and I started working as a teacher at the Living Wisdom School in Portland.
At that point, I had quit professional music, and I just dove headfirst into teaching, with these kids who were all in the age group of 6 to 12, and it was the hardest job I’ve ever had, because of the tremendous energy I had to put out to manage the kids and connect with them. I had a class of all girls and one very shy boy who was overwhelmed and wasn’t able to put out much energy. So, for the first two years, it was just the typical, terribly difficult, soul-searing experience of being a beginning teacher.
Then we moved to Ananda Village, where I taught music in the Living Wisdom School for twelve years, and it was an incredibly fulfilling experience, and very, very successful.
Q: Here in Palo Alto, Helen and Gary often have to explain to parents why we spend so much time on the arts. The parents wonder if we might be neglecting the kids’ academic studies.
Arthur Gu performs an advanced classical piece during the 2015 LWS Spring Concert
It can be difficult to persuade them that forty years of experience have shown us that engaging kids in the performing arts has a very positive effect on their academic performance. There’s a strong component of feeling in the learning experience, and it needs to be cultivated, as an important cornerstone of the academic curriculum.
One of our students is a gifted young classical pianist. Arthur just finished third grade, and you can see that he’s totally focused and engaged when he plays, and it’s a quality that carries over to his studies, and his interactions with the other children.
In your years of teaching, have you noticed that the children’s lives are meaningfully enhanced as a result of the time they spend in the arts?
David: Without the slightest question. One of my first students in the Portland school was Keshava Betts, who’s now in his late twenties and lives in Los Angeles, where he plays cello very inspiringly. Keshava realized very early on that if he was feeling low, all he had to do was pick up the cello and play, and he would very quickly feel better. That’s a huge gift – to have the tools to raise our consciousness. It’s one of the most valuable skills we can learn.
I remember coming out of a horrible opera rehearsal one night. As I drove home in the rain, I was feeling drenched by the misery of it all. And then I began to sing a solo that I had volunteered to do, from the oratorio “Christ Lives” by Swami Kriyananda. It was just a way to pass the time on what would have otherwise been a miserable drive. I wasn’t expecting any great change in my consciousness, but then, whammo! I felt a tremendous current of joy. It was so powerful that I had to pull over to the side of the road and wonder, “What in the world just happened?! I don’t understand this. How did this happen?” (laughs)
The song I had started to sing was a very simple piece. It stayed within the octave, and it wasn’t sophisticated at all. Yet it left me wondering, “How did this move me so powerfully? How was it able to change me, in an instant?”
Swami Kriyananda talked about this force in music. He said that music, like architecture, can hold a vibration, and a state of consciousness. And when we walk into an inspired piece of music, it’s like walking into a beautiful building, and it can change our consciousness. We walk into a holy place and we feel uplifted, and we walk into a holy song, and the same thing can happen.
For me, it’s an awe-inspiring responsibility to provide uplifting music for children. I’m teaching music at the school in Portland now, and for the children to walk into these pieces, it changes them. It’s very important to provide opportunities for them to explore those higher places in themselves.
You can’t force it. It’s not something that you can ever hope to drive into them – “Now I want you to feel!” (laughs) And it’s the same with adults. There are adults who love the music, but they have a hard time tuning in to the inner experience of it. And it’s a joy to help them find that happiness in themselves.
I’m working with a music education program called El Sistema, which was started in Venezuela in 1975 by an educator, musician, and activist, José Antonio Abreu.
It brought intense classical music training into the slums, the barrios, and it transformed the whole society, to the point where eighty percent of the doctors and lawyers and educators came up through this system as children. That’s an amazing, powerful statistic!
We’re working with children in an impoverished area of north Portland. It’s hard to measure the changes in just the last three years, because how can you compare where a child is now, compared to some other potential for the child? But we’ve seen an incredibly positive development of personal skills and confidence and social maturity.
Q: These inner changes are starting to be documented by science. It’s been shown, for example, that in the presence of expansive feelings like love, compassion, kindness, and so on, the heart’s rhythms change from relatively chaotic to extremely harmonious. The scientists who’ve studied these changes have shown that those harmonious vibrations have a powerful effect on the body and brain. They’ve found that in school districts where they’ve taught their heart-harmonizing methods to children, including methods that employ music, the children’s grades uniformly improve.
There’s a YouTube video, “How Playing an Instrument Benefits Your Brain”:
David: A wonderful thing about music therapy is that it brings the children into an uplifted, happy place in their consciousness, without your having to nag them into changing.
David, Caitlyn, and Michelle (2008)
There doesn’t have to be a teacher or parent yelling at them, “Change your energy!” And the kid is going, “I don’t know how.” But if you have them perform uplifting music, it puts them in the right cycle automatically, and it does it effortlessly.
It’s been really fun for me, over the years, to have the children perform only Swami Kriyananda’s music for a time. I was amazed how the kids never tired of it. And if they want to learn some new songs, we were fortunate to have over four hundred pieces to choose from.
Through music, children are able to tap into a higher awareness that’s always with them, without having to struggle to quiet the mind, or to get past the intellect. We would do these positive, uplifting songs, and they loved them – like “Mañana, Friends,” or “A New Tomorrow” or “If You’re Seeking Freedom.” And it was amazing how it would change their mood.
Q: Thank you, David. At Living Wisdom School, we’re inspired by the streams of energy and joy and consciousness that flow through our school, both in academics and the arts.
We encourage parents who are considering enrolling their children in Living Wisdom School to watch the film Race to Nowhere, as we feel it makes the best possible argument in favor of the Education for Life approach.
NOTE: The film is available on Netflix, and on YouTube for a rental fee of $3.99. You can watch the trailer on YouTube here, and follow the link in the right column at the start of the trailer (it also appears at the end of the trailer) to rent the film.
Race to Nowhere describes, through segments with parents, educators, and counselors, the terrible toll that the current obsession with grades, test results, and acceptance by prestigious colleges is taking on children and their families. The filmmakers suggest solutions that have been in place in the Living Wisdom Schools for more than 40 years, and that have more than proved their worth.
Our educational approach addresses and effectively resolves all of the issues addressed in the film: the pressures that drive students to cheating and even suicide; the false definitions of success; the myth that an exclusive focus on academics is the fastest path to academic results; the equally false belief that results on standardized tests and volume of homework reflect academic progress; the severe impact of the current obsession with college acceptance on family life and children’s mental, emotional, and physical health.
“When I decided to cut our homework in half, our AP scores went up!” — High school Advanced Placement biology teacher in Race to Nowhere.
The educational philosophy that we follow at Living Wisdom School is called Education for Life (EFL). It’s based on helping children achieve academic and personal success by a balanced development of their personal “Tools of Maturity”: body, feelings, will, and mind.
A well-rounded education nurtures a child’s enthusiasm, which in turn fuels academic success.
Mainstream education, with its emphasis on test scores, emphasizes training only one of these childhood developmental tools – the intellect – at the expense of the child’s growth in other areas.
Let’s compare the results of these two very different approaches.
Education for Life and Testing
While Education for Life doesn’t emphasize academic testing for young children, our older students often express an interest in knowing how they are doing academically compared to other students their age.
When the EFL high school applied for accreditation in 2005, the process required the students to take a nationally recognized standardized test, administered annually.
The results have been nothing short of remarkable. Every year the students as a group have placed in the top 10 percent of schools nationwide on average, reaching the top 1 percent on one occasion.
Their SAT scores have been equally impressive, with the average EFL student scoring 1691, compared to the national average of about 1500.
How can EFL students compete so well against students in elite academic schools, when our focus includes significant time spent on the arts, outdoor activities, service projects, and travel?
Current research offers some insights.
The Body and the Intellect
It would seem obvious that a healthy body provides a sound foundation for a healthy mind. Disease, stress, and a lack of hygiene can erode the energy required for focusing the mind and working hard in academics. This relationship was clearly demonstrated by a study from the National Academy of Sciences in 2013:
State-mandated academic achievement testing has had the unintended consequence of reducing opportunities for children to be physically active during the school day and beyond…. Yet little evidence supports the notion that more time allocated to subject matter will translate into better test scores. Indeed, 11 of 14 correlational studies of physical activity during the school day demonstrate a positive relationship to academic performance. Overall, a rapidly growing body of work suggests that time spent engaged in physical activity is related not only to a healthier body but also to a healthier mind.
Feelings and the Intellect
Similarly, the ability to manage one’s feelings constructively can be a tremendous aid for maintaining mental focus in the face of interpersonal tensions or inner turmoil.
The advent of the term “emotional intelligence” in 1995 evoked a wave of research authenticating the importance of social and emotional growth.
A key report by J. Payton et al. surveyed data from 317 studies involving 324,303 students. The authors concluded:
SEL [Social and Emotional Learning] programming improved students’ academic performance by 11 to 17 percentile points across the three reviews, indicating that they offer students a practical educational benefit…. Although some educators argue against implementing this type of holistic programming because it takes valuable time away from core academic material, our findings suggest that SEL programming not only does not detract from academic performance but actually increases students’ performance on standardized tests and grades.
Will Power and Intellect
The connection between will power and the intellect is evident in qualities such as perseverance, concentration, and initiative. In The Willpower Instinct, Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonigal, Ph.D surveyed the results of over 200 studies.
People who have strong will power are better off – i.e., [they have] better control of their attention, emotions, and actions. They are happier and healthier. Their relationships are more satisfying and last longer. They make more money and go further in their careers. They are better able to manage stress, deal with conflict, and overcome adversity. They live longer. Self-control is a better predictor of academic success than IQ. It’s a stronger determinant of effective leadership than charisma. It’s more important for marital harmony than empathy.
Conclusion and Prediction
It may take a while, but educators are acknowledging that too much one-sided emphasis on the intellect is counterproductive.
Even the “winners” with this approach are adversely affected. In a nationally televised interview in November 2011, an NBC reporter talked with an administrator at Peking University High School in Shanghai, the top school worldwide as measured by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, where the students put in 12 hours of study per day, including weekends. The school administrator lamented:
Test taking is damaging to students’ creativity, critical thinking skills and, in general, China’s ability to compete in the world. It can make students very narrow-minded. In the 21st century, China needs the creative types its education system isn’t producing.
For over 40 years, Education for Life has pioneered an approach that cultivates the child’s intellect without neglecting other important contributors to the student’s academic success, namely the body, feelings, and will.
Modern research shows that the future of education will favor schools that can implement an integrated, holistic approach, along the lines of Education for Life and the Living Wisdom Schools.
Most people assume that if they strive very hard to achieve success in school and at work, and if they succeed in making a lot of money, and having a prestigious job, and marrying and raising a family, they’ll be happy.
At Living Wisdom School, we practice a completely different approach. Since our first school opened in the early 1970s, we’ve realized that children do better in school when we teach them how to be happy at the start. It’s one reason our school rules begin with “Choose Happiness!”
Shawn Achor’s book is based on his research with hundreds of Harvard students and successful business leaders.
Shawn Achor’s book is based on his research with hundreds of Harvard students and successful business leaders.
Naturally, this approach raises questions for parents, even though our students do very well in standardized testing, and in high school and college.
In fact, there’s scientific evidence that putting happiness first works very well on the job and in school.
If we’ve aroused your curiosity, we invite you to watch the following fascinating 12-minute TED Talk with Shawn Achor, author of the New York Times bestseller The Happiness Advantage. (You can also read the transcript.)
And here’s a bombshell article, Be More Successful: New Harvard Research Reveals a Fun Way to Do It, that was posted on the popular Barking Up the Wrong Tree website (120,000 subscribers). It’s based on an interview with Shawn Achor who summarizes his research that kids who learn to be happy do a lot better in school than those who burn themselves out with fact-cramming and studying to the test.
(For your interest, we present Shawn’s bio below.)
In this talk, given at the Dalai Lama Center, Shawn shares his findings on The Happiness Advantage for Children. (7 minutes)
Shawn Achor Bio
Shawn Achor is the winner of over a dozen distinguished teaching awards at Harvard University, where he delivered lectures on positive psychology in the most popular class at Harvard.
Shawn has become one of the world’s leading experts on the connection between happiness and success. His research on happiness made the cover of Harvard Business Review. His TED talk is one of the most popular all time, with over 4 million views, and his lecture on PBS has been seen by millions.
Shawn teaches in the Advanced Management Program at Wharton Business School and collaborates on research with Yale and Columbia University.
Shawn graduated magna cum laude from Harvard and earned a master’s degree from Harvard Divinity School in Christian and Buddhist ethics. For seven years, he served as an Officer of Harvard, living in Harvard Yard and counseling students through the stresses of their first year. Though he now travels extensively, Shawn continues to conduct original research on happiness and organizational achievement in collaboration with Yale University and the Institute for Applied Positive Research.
In 2007, Shawn founded Good Think to share his findings with the world. Shawn has since lectured or researched in 51 countries, talking to CEOs in China, school children in South Africa, doctors in Dubai, and farmers in Zimbabwe.
He has spoken to the Royal Family in Abu Dhabi, doctors at St. Jude Children’s Hospital, and worked with the U.S. Department of Health to promote happiness. In 2012, Shawn helped lead the Everyday Matters campaign with the National MS Society and Genzyme, to show how happiness remains a choice for those struggling with chronic illness.
