Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them. Martin Seligman More Quotes by Martin Seligman More Quotes From Martin Seligman To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they're wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, It is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth. Martin Seligman running drama mean I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. Martin Seligman incomplete wisdom believe There are physical characteristics which are inherited. These include things like good looks, high intelligence, physical coordination. These attributes contribute to success in life, and success in life is a determinant of optimism. Martin Seligman optimism life-is looks Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people. Martin Seligman being-positive optimistic people P is positive emotion, E is engagement, R is relationships, M is meaning and A is accomplishment. Those are the five elements of what free people chose to do. Pretty much everything else is in service of one of or more of these goals. That's the human dashboard. Martin Seligman goals service positive people The word 'happiness' always bothered me, partly because it was scientifically unwieldy and meant a lot of different things to different people, and also because it's subjective. Martin Seligman me always happiness people I think you can be depressed and flourish, I think you can have cancer and flourish, I think you can be divorced and flourish. When we believed that happiness was only smiling and good mood, that wasn't very good for people like me, people in the lower half of positive affectivity. Martin Seligman good me positive happiness It's no surprise that optimistic athletes, managers and teams do better. What's interesting is where they do better. It's in coming back from defeat and acting in the clutch. Martin Seligman better back defeat surprise Positive psychology is not remotely intended to replace therapy or pharmacology. So when depressed, anxious or in panic or post-traumatic stress disorder, I am all for therapies that will work. Positive psychology is another arrow in the quiver of public policy and psychology through which we can raise wellbeing above zero. Martin Seligman i-am stress work positive I believe psychology has done very well in working out how to understand and treat disease. But I think that is literally half-baked. If all you do is work to fix problems, to alleviate suffering, then by definition you are working to get people to zero, to neutral. Martin Seligman you work believe people If you were an optimistic teen, then you'll be an optimist at 80. People's reactions to bad events are highly stable over a half century or more. Martin Seligman teen bad you people It is the combination of reasonable talent and the ability to keep going in the face of defeat that leads to success. Martin Seligman face keep-going talent success Rather than giving people an inflated view of themselves, we need to give them concrete reasons to feel good about themselves. Martin Seligman view feel good people Positive emotion alienated from the exercise of character leads to emptiness, to inauthenticity, to depression, and, as we age, to the gnawing realization that we are fidgeting until we die. Martin Seligman age depression positive character One of my signature strengths is the love of learning, and by teaching, I have built it into the fabric of my life. I try to do some of it every day. Martin Seligman day learning love life Creativity is bound up in our ability to find new ways around old problems. Martin Seligman find problems new creativity I don't mind being wrong, and I don't mind changing my mind. Martin Seligman changing wrong being mind Life satisfaction essentially measures cheerful moods, so it is not entitled to a central place in any theory that aims to be more than a happiology. Martin Seligman more place satisfaction life One of my worries about America is the epidemic of depression we've been in. One of the possibilities about that is that the 'I' gets bigger and bigger, and the 'we' gets smaller and smaller. Martin Seligman possibilities been depression america I'm all for past influences; the question is whether they are deterministic. Freud and the behaviorists argue that what we are at any given moment is billiard balls whose past determines our future course. That doesn't take into account that we are forever generating internal representations of positive futures and choosing among them. Martin Seligman moment future positive past
