Big Potential: How Transforming the Pursuit of Success Raises Our Achievement, Happiness, and Well-Being

Striving first to the point of emptiness leads to depression. Professor Sean Achor offers a solution to this problem — to accumulate “The Big Potential” (your own and those around you). Praise others and help them so that together you can achieve more.

The author of the book, Sean Achor, is a professor of positive psychology at Harvard University, a researcher of happiness, one of the most popular instructors at Harvard, a coach and speaker. He is a student of Dr. Tal Ben-Shahar, a researcher of positive psychology and leadership at Harvard.

Sean is one of the founders of the Institute of Positive Psychology research. His positive psychology course became one of the most popular and attended at Harvard, and his research and lectures on happiness and human potential are popularized by The New York Times, Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, as well as NPR and CNN radio.

He gives lectures on positive psychology and conducts corporate masterclasses for companies from the Fortune 500 list and for non-profit organizations. Sean is also one of the most popular TED speakers; his talk on happiness as a guarantee of success, achievement, and wellbeing has over 17 million views.

Sean Achor founded the consulting company Aspirant, which studies “The Big Potential” — the lives and achievements of outstanding people — to identify statistically significant patterns and find the points where a person’s potential, success, and happiness intersect. He also conducted research for the Swiss bank UBS and confirmed the working hypothesis that changing the paradigm in which we think about stress changes the physical reactions of our body to stress.

And Sean also wrote a children’s fairy tale about The Big Potential and positive psychology, “The Orange Frog.”