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I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete.

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
Believe
Incomplete
Traditional
Wisdom

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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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What are the enabling conditions that make human beings flourish? How do we get from zero to plus five?
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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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The Fundamentalist Religions simply seem to offer more hope for a brighter future than do the more liberal, humanistic ones.
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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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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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The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
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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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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 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.
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Finding permanent and universal causes for misfortune is the practice of despair.
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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.
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Self-esteem cannot be directly injected. It needs to result from doing well, from being warranted.
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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.
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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.
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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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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.
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One of the things psychologists used to say was that if you are depressed, anxious or angry, you couldn't be happy. Those were at opposite ends of a continuum. I believe that you can be suffering or have a mental illness and be happy - just not in the same moment that you're sad.
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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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Whether or not we have hope depends on two dimensions of our explanatory style pervasiveness and permanence.
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