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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.

Martin Seligman

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Martin Seligman
Age: 82
Born: 1942
Born: August 12
Bridge Player
Psychologist
University Teacher
Writer
Albany
New York
Martin E. P. Seligman
Martin E P Seligman
M. E. P. Seligman
M E P Seligman
M. Seligman
M Seligman
Seligman
Seligman M
Seligman M.
Seligman M. E. P.
Seligman MEP
Martin Elias Peter Seligman
Give
Requires
Giving
Keys
Believe
Failure
Style
Face
Explanatory
Ability
Helplessness
Faces
Persistence
Success
Optimistic

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Reaching beyond where you are is really important.
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Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.
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I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize.
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On the other hand, permanent causes produce helplessness far into the future, and universal causes spread helplessness through all your endeavors.
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What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?
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When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.
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Flow occurs in your life when your highest skills are matched to challenges that quite exactly meet them.
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Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them [I was a psychologist], they'd move away from me. ... And now when I tell people what I do, they move toward me.
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Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness, without changing passivity, accomplishes nothing.
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Psychology should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage
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People who believe they cause good things tend to like themselves better than people who believe good things come from other people or circumstances.
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There is one aspect of happiness that's been well studied, and it's the notion of flow. Ask yourselves, when for you does time stop? When are you truly at home, wanting to be no place else?
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We're not prisoners of the past.
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The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
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You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.
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Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.
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Finding temporary and specific causes for misfortune is the art of hope: Temporary causes limit helplessness in time, and specific causes limit helplessness to the original situation.
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Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.
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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.
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Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style pervasiveness and permanence.
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