Learned Optimism

by Martin E.P. Seligman

Habits of thinking need not be forever. One of the most significant findings in psychology in the last twenty years is that individuals can choose the way they think.

For the age of the self is also the age of that phenomenon so closely linked to pessimism: depression, the ultimate expression of pessimism.

What is crucial is what you think when you fail, using the power of “non-negative thinking.”

Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.

I see events as successes or failures of personal control.

Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn’t matter. Explanatory style is the manner in which you habitually explain to yourself why events happen.