Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence.
When we take time to notice the things that go right – it means we’re getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.
Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals choose the way they think.
People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.
Habits of pessimism lead to depression, wither achievement, and undermine physical health. The good news is that pessimism can be unlearned, and that with its removal depression, underachievement, and poor health can be alleviated.
In your own life, you should take particular care with endings, for their color will forever tinge your memory of the entire relationship and your willingness to reenter it.
When it comes to our health, there are essentially four things under our control: the decision not to smoke, a commitment to exercise, the quality of our diet, and our level of optimism. And optimism is at least as beneficial as the others.
We’re not prisoners of the past.
Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.
Reaching beyond where you are is really important.
The clearer the rules and the limits enforced by parents, the higher the child’s self-esteem. The more freedom the child had, the lower his self-esteem.
Psychology is much bigger than just medicine, or fixing unhealthy things. Its about education, work, marriage – its even about sports. What I want to do is see psychologists working to help people build strengths in all these domains.
Optimism is invaluable for the meaningful life. With a firm belief in a positive future, you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are.
Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.
To be a virtuous person is to display, by acts of will, all or at least most of the six ubiquitous virtues: wisdom, courage, humanity, justice, temperance, and transcendence.
Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.
The belief that we can rely on shortcuts to happiness, joy, rapture, comfort, and ecstasy, rather than be entitled to these feelings by the exercise of personal strengths and virtues, leads to legions of people who, in the middle of great wealth, are starving spiritually.
What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.
What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?
Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them.