Happiness is linked to later success. Stop treating happiness like a reward you earn after the win. A review of 225 studies found that happy people tend to become more successful at work, in relationships, and in health, and that happiness often comes first. Psychologists Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener pulled the research together in Psychological Bulletin in 2005, testing the reverse of the usual assumption that success makes you happy. Their question was whether feeling good often helps you succeed. Snapshot studies showed happy people doing better in marriage, friendships, income, work, and health. Studies that followed people over years showed happiness came before many of those wins. And lab experiments, where researchers put people in a good mood on purpose, showed good moods made people more social, more helpful, and more creative. How often people feel good mattered most to the researchers, which is why "frequent" is in the paper's title. Small, regular good moods were the pattern connected with success. Some effects were modest, and studies measured happiness in lots of different ways. All three kinds of evidence still pointed the same way. Happiness showed up before success often enough that waiting to be happy until after you succeed gets the order backward.