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What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?

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
Human
Humans
Enabling
Make
Flourish
Zero
Plus
Beings
Conditions
Five

More quotes by Martin Seligman

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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. A life that does this is pregnant with meaning, and if God comes at the end, such a life is sacred.
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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.
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Money, amazingly, is losing its power... Our economy is rapidly changing from a money economy to a satisfaction economy.
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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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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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Well-being cannot exist just in your own head. Well-being is a combination of feeling good as well as actually having meaning, good relationships and accomplishment.
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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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Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style pervasiveness and permanence.
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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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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
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I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete.
Martin Seligman
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By activating an expansive, tolerant, and creative mindset, positive feelings maximize the social, intellectual, and physical benefits that will accrue.
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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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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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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.
Martin Seligman
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Positive, optimistic sales people sell more than pessimistic sales people.
Martin Seligman
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On the relationship side, if you teach people to respond actively and constructively when someone they care about has a victory, it increases love and friendship and decreases the probability of depression.
Martin Seligman
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Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.
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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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The drive to resist compulsion is more important in wild animals than sex, food, or water... The drive for competence or to resist compulsion is a drive to avoid helplessness.
Martin Seligman