Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment

by Martin E.P. Seligman

We use “Best Moments” to shape a positive state-of-mind ratio that, we hope, our children will internalize as they grow up.

As the children have gotten older, we have added a preview of tomorrow to the review of the day. We tried to add the preview (“What are you looking forward to tomorrow?

my first piece of advice about building strengths in kids is to reward all displays of any of the strengths.

second and final piece of advice is go out of your way to allow your child to display these burgeoning signature strengths in the course of your normal family activities.

the thesis of the nonzero sum game put forward by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern. A win-loss game, he reminds us, is an activity in which the fortunes of the winner and loser are inversely related, and a win-win game has a net result that is positive.

Biological systems are forced—designed without a designer—by Darwinian selection into more complexity and more win-win scenarios. A cell that incorporates mitochondria symbiotically wins out over cells that cannot.

The universal picture of political change over the centuries, all across the world, is from savage to barbarian to civilization. This is a progression with an increase in winwin situations at its core. The more positive-sum games in a culture, the more likely it is to survive and flourish.

Could it be, I speculate, that negative emotion has evolved to help us in win-loss games?

When we feel a negative emotion, it is a signal that we are in a win-loss game. Such emotions set up an action repertoire that fights, flees, or gives up.

Could it be that positive emotion, then, has evolved to motivate and guide us through win-win games? When we are in a situation in which everyone might benefit—courting, hunting together, raising children, cooperating, planting seeds, teaching and learning—joy, good cheer, contentment, and happiness motivate us and guide our actions. Positive emotions are part of a sensory system that alerts to us the presence of a potential win-win. They also set up an action repertoire and a mindset that broadens and builds abiding intellectual and social resources. Positive emotions, in short, build the cathedrals of our lives. “If this is right, the human future is even better than you predict, Bob. If we are on the threshold of an era of win-win games, we are on the threshold of an era of good feeling—literally, good feeling.” “You mentioned meaning and a theological angle, Marty?” The dubious look does not leave Bob’s face, but I am reassured by the absence of any lemon-sucking lip movements that the idea that positive emotion and win-win games are intertwined makes sense to him. “I thought you were a nonbeliever.” “I am. At least I was. I’ve never been able to choke down the idea of a supernatural God who stands outside of time, a God who designs and creates the universe. As much as I wanted to, I never been able to believe there was any meaning in life beyond the meaning we choose to adopt for ourselves. But now I’m beginning to think I was wrong, or partly wrong. What I have to sa...

The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power, or goodness.

The good life: using your signature strengths to obtain abundant gratification in the main realms of your life.

A meaningful life adds one more component to the good life—the attachment of your signature strengths to something larger.

The meaningful life: using your signature strengths and virtues in the service of something much larger than you are.