What does happiness have to do with work?

Kellie Garnett has always been tense. When she was in the first grade, she rarely smiled. She remained focused on doing well in class, following the rules, pleasing the teacher, and getting good grades. She couldn’t relax, even though her parents tried to help her calm down and find some joy. They created a chart and would add a gold star to it every time she smiled. Ten stars meant a Disney movie in a big theater with popcorn. This little game of motivation gave her incentive to smile. It also taught her an important lesson: Positivity takes persistence. After all, happiness is an accomplishment.

Flash forward, many years later, and Kellie is all grown up and running the editorial meeting each morning at KING 5, the NBC affiliate TV station in Seattle. She’s doing it with a smile and laughter—and Fun Fact Friday. Each week she invests a few minutes to research and deliver a fun fact to the daily gathering of skeptical, curmudgeonly journalists, TV producers, and managers. Often these facts were related to one of the people in the meeting and usually a fun surprise for everyone else. By doing this, she literally forced happiness into the workday, if only once a week and, as someone who attended these meetings, I always appreciated her effort.   

Her transformation didn’t happen by accident. She remade her approach to life and work with intention and effort. 

“I was tired of listening to my negative thoughts, tired of the self-imposed pressure,” Kellie told me. “I wanted a better outlook and a more enjoyable life. So I made a conscious decision to try to be more positive. Knowing myself, I figured it would be impossible to change. But I was determined to see if I could fake it until I made it. And that’s just what happened.”

She started Fun Fact Friday as a chance to surprise even the most savvy of journalists with a gem of knowledge. “No matter how tense it got, or how much pressure I felt, I tried to stay positive,” she says. 

Powered by this newfound positivity, Kellie’s professional growth exploded. In 2016, Kellie made a huge career change and joined Starbucks as editor-in-chief of the company’s blog, 1912 Pike. A couple years later, she jumped to a better opportunity at Amazon and in 2020 was promoted to the title of Principal of Strategic Communication for Alexa Everywhere. 

Being positive at work can have a ripple effect through a team and organization. It can also lead to increased happiness outside of work and serve as a force of change in people’s lives in a way that few other emotions can do. 

Author Shawn Achor calls it “The Happiness Advantage.” While conventional wisdom suggests that success and achievement cause happiness, it’s actually the other way around, according to Achor. This finding is based on extensive research. More than 200 scientific studies on nearly 275,000 people found that happiness leads to success in nearly every domain of our lives—especially at work. 

“Based on the wealth of data they compiled, they found that happiness causes success and achievement, not the other way around,” Achor writes in his 2010 book The Happiness Advantage. “Happy workers have higher levels of productivity, produce higher sales, perform better in leadership positions, and receive higher performance ratings and higher pay,”

While this sounds too good to be true, it’s real. Kellie’s career path is proof. Veering from journalism and the one place she had worked in her career provided an opportunity to use her powers of positivity.

“It was universally accepted, a language and attitude that opened doors with almost everyone I met,” Kellie says. “And those that were resistant often came around, when they trusted my words weren’t hollow platitudes but real talk.”

- This is an excerpt from The Butterfly Impact, a new book on creating work-life balance through small, meaningful actions.