Learned Optimism

"The traditional view of achievement, like the traditional view of
depression, needs overhauling. Our workplaces and our schools operate
on the conventional assumption that success results from a combination
of talent and desire. When failure occurs, it is because either
talent or desire is missing. But failure can also occur when talent and
desire are present in abundance but optimism is missing."
"The commonness of being knocked flat by troubles, however, does
not mean it is acceptable or that life has to be this way. If you use a different
explanatory style, you'll be better equipped to cope with troubled
times and keep them from propelling you towards depression."
"What we want is not blind optimism but flexible optimism—optimism
with its eyes open. We must be able to use pessimism's keen sense of
reality when we need it, but without having to dwell in its dark
shadows."

Martin Seligman is a cognitive psychologist who spent many
years clinically testing the idea of "learned helplessness." His
experiments giving mild electric shocks to dogs proved that
dogs would give up trying to escape if they believed that, whatever they
did, the shocks would keep coming. Another researcher tested the principle
on people, using noise instead of shocks, and found that learned
helplessness can be engineered in human minds just as easily. Yet the
experiments contained an anomaly: As with the dog experiments, one
in every three human subjects would not "give up," they kept trying to
press buttons on a panel in an attempt to shut off the noise. What
made these subjects different from the others?
Seligman applied the question to real life: What makes someone pick
themselves up after rejection by a lover, or another keep going when
their life's work comes to nothing? He found that the ability of some
people to bounce back from apparent defeat is not, as we sentimentally
like to say, a "triumph of the human will." Rather than having an
inborn trait of greatness, such people have developed a way of explaining
events that does not see defeat as permanent or affecting their basic
values. Nor is this trait something that "we either have or we don't"—
optimism involves a set of skills that can be learned.
Positive explanatory style
Pessimistic people tend to think that misfortune is their fault. The cause
of their specific misfortune or general misery is, they believe, permanent—
stupidity, lack of talent, ugliness—therefore they do not bother
to change it. Few of us are wholly pessimistic, but most of us will have
given pessimism free reign in reaction to particular past events. In psychology
textbooks, such reactions are considered "normal." But Seligman
says that it does not have to be this way, that a different way of
explaining setbacks to yourself ("explanatory style") will protect you from letting crises cast you into depression. If you have even an average
level of pessimism, Seligman says, it will drag down your success in
every arena of life: work, relationships, health.
The author undertook groundbreaking work for life insurance company
MetLife. Life insurance is considered one of the most difficult of
all sales jobs, a real spirit crusher. The company was spending millions
of dollars a year training its agents, only to see most of them move on.
Instead of the usual criteria by which MetLife hired (career background
and so on), Seligman suggested that applicants be hired if they
tested well for optimism and explanatory style. The result: Agents
hired on this basis did 20 percent better than the regular recruits in
the first year, and 57 percent better in the second. They clearly had
better ways to deal with the nine out of ten rejections that would
make the others give up.
Optimism and success
Conventional thinking is that success creates optimism, but the evidence
laid out by Seligman shows the reverse to be true. On a repeat
basis optimism tends to deliver success, as the experience of the life
insurance agents demonstrated. At the exact same point that a pessimist
will wilt, an optimist perseveres and breaks through an invisible
barrier.
Not getting through this barrier is often misinterpreted as laziness or
lack of talent. Seligman found that people who give up easily never dispute
their own interpretation of failure or disparagement. Those who
regularly "vault the wall" listen to their internal dialog and argue
against their own limiting thoughts, quickly finding positive reasons for
rejection.
The value of pessimism
Yet Learned Optimism admits that there is one area in which pessimists
excel: their ability to see a situation more accurately. Some professions
(financial control and accounting or safety engineering, for
example) and all firms could do with a few bring-us-down-to-earth pessimists.
In Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999) Bill Gates discusses
this very trait, lauding the Microsoft employees who can tell him what
is going wrong and do so quickly. Nevertheless, let's not forget that Gates is also a dreamer par excellence,
who at a very young age imagined a world in which every home
and office would be using his Windows software. Seligman is clear on
the point that success in work and life results when we can both perceive
present reality accurately and visualize a compelling future. Many
people are good at one and not the other. Someone who wishes to learn
optimism must keep the former skill, while becoming a better dreamer.
The combination is unbeatable.
Most depression results from thinking badly
It is slightly ironic that Learned Optimism draws much of its data from
studies of depression. Before cognitive therapy, depression was always
thought of being either "anger turned in upon itself" (Freud) or a
chemical malfunction in the brain. However, pioneering cognitive
researchers Albert Ellis and Aaron T. Beck (see Feeling Good) set out to
prove that negative thoughts are not a symptom of depression, they
cause it. Most of us know this at a common-sense level, but
psychotherapy allows us to believe that we are dealing with something
beyond our control.
Seligman is a leading authority on sex differences in depression. He
says that women are twice as likely to suffer from it because, although
men and women experience mild depression at the same rate, how
women think about problems tends to amplify them. Rumination on a
problem, always connecting it back to some "unchangeable" aspect of
ourselves, is a recipe for the blues. Millions of dollars have been spent
by America's National Institute of Mental Health to test this idea that
depression (i.e., the standard variety, not bipolar or manic) results from
habits of thought. Seligman tells us the results in two words: "It does."
Moreover, developing the mental muscles of optimism significantly
reduces the likelihood that we will become depressed.
Habitual optimism
This brings us to a bigger question: Why is there so much depression
around? Seligman argues that our recent preoccupation with individualism
creates its own form of mental shackles. If we are invited to
believe in our own endless possibilities, any form of failure becomes
devastating. Combine this with the crumbling of previously solid psychological supports—the nation, God, the extended family—and we
have an epidemic of depression.
However, while drugs like Prozac can be effective in eliminating it,
there is a gap between successfully treated depression and habitual
optimism. With the positive explanatory style that Seligman recommends
problems are seen as temporary, specific, and external, rather
than inevitable expressions of our failure as a person. Cognitive therapy
changes the basic way a person sees the world and that altered perception
tends to be permanent.
Final comments
Learned Optimism is a product of the sea change that occurred in psychology
in the mid-1960s. Until then, a person's behavior was considered
to be either "pushed" by internal urges (Freudianism) or "pulled"
by the rewards or punishments that society provided (behaviorism).
Cognitive therapy, in contrast, showed that people could actually
change the way they think, in spite of unconscious leanings or societal
conditioning. As Seligman notes toward the end of the book, the
upheavals of the modern era, such as mass migration, made rapid personal
change necessary; now it is desirable. Yet we are a culture of selfimprovers
because we know self-improvement is possible—not just
experience but psychological science proves it.
Learned Optimism is an important work within the self-help field
because it provides a scientific foundation for many claims. It became a
bestseller because it attracted readers who normally would consider
personal development ideas as, to use the author's phrase, "metaphysical
boosterism." The book is therefore not simply about optimism
(though it may well turn you into an optimist) but about the validity of
personal change itself and the dynamic nature of the human condition.
Seligman's latest work, Authentic Happiness, incorporates many of the
findings and ideas of Learned Optimism but takes the idea of "positive
psychology" further. It is highly recommended