I can appreciate a self-help book written by a scientist with the body of work to back it up. I liked learning about helping kids develop healthy ways of thinking about the world, especially when they are faced with trying circumstances early in life.

It's too late for me though, I'm far too in love with my own pessimism. ( )

Middle of the road for me. ( )

A lot of this book is about how to identify if you are pessimistic, or if your children are depressed (despite the fact the author says it's impossible for children to be depressed). It's a lot of filler with not much actionable or theoretical content. ( )

It’s gotten old. ( )

not permanent, pervasive and personal. ( )

Published in 1990, Learned Optimism warned of an epidemic increase in depressive mental illness. A quick Google search suggests that the epidemic continues to increase, at least in western industrialised cultures. Seligman provides a half-baked evolutionary explanation for this modern plague. Depressive mental illness, in those who suffer from the condition, correlates with pessimism. When human existence was nasty brutal and short, pessimism served us well. Pessimists, to give them their due, usually have a more secure hold on reality than optimists. Seligman speculates that our ancestors, who ‘survived the Pleistocene may have done so because they had the capacity to worry incessantly about the future’. Now it is different. The enormous expansion of human freedoms and choices in modern societies encourages a deleterious tendency to inward reflection and insecurity about our extended sense of self, the ‘maximal self’ in Seligman’s terminology. He argues that pessimism, when allied with a ‘ruminant’ style of thinking, can quickly lead to depressive mental illness. Women, who are far more likely to explore their feelings, are in consequence far more likely than men to suffer depression. This is a crude and brutal theorisation of depression and its origins but perhaps one should not expect more sophistication or nuance in discussion of a self help manual. Seligman provides a self diagnostic quiz to enable his readers to locate themselves on various scales of pessimism, optimism and depression.

Fortunately, Seligman avers, there are two cures for the debilitating scourge of pessimism and its depressive sequel. The first is the cultivation of habits of thought that Seligman calls ‘learned optimism’. Surveys suggest that optimists live longer, happier, healthier and more successful lives than pessimists. Learned Optimism provides drills and exercises to exorcise debilitating pessimism. It is quite possible that Seligman is correct in his prescription, though more recent research does not seem to support his hopes that optimism cures cancer.

Learned Optimism concludes with a more visionary alternative cure for epidemic depression. Reduce our endemic preoccupation with the maximal self, Seligman suggests and learn altruism instead. He calls it ‘moral jogging’. The triteness of the slogan grates, but it masks an inspiring programme of self transformation. Here are some of his prescriptions: give generously to charity, but make it personal. When asked by a homeless person for money, stop and talk to the supplicant. Then give generously and with discrimination, according to need. Set aside a fund of 5% of your taxable income, invite applications for benefits and interview the applicants, selecting those who are most deserving of your help. Give an evening a week to community activities. Visit and comfort those who are dying of AIDS. (Seligman is writing in the last decades of the 20th century, when AIDS was often a death sentence for young men.) Devote three hours a week to actively promoting, by letters, meetings or personal solicitation, necessary social reforms. Twelve hours a week, or thereabouts, spent in altruistic activity can be a cure for excessive self-absorption, pessimism and a preventive against sliding into depressive mental illness.

Seligman’s promotion of a more altruistic society should be remembered to his credit, in contrast to the repellent cruelty of his earlier experimental work, teaching ‘learned helplessness’ to caged dogs. ( )

Surprisingly helpful book. Seligman isn't saying that we should view the world through rose-tinted glasses - instead, (not to be too simplistic), he shows how many of us look at it through an unrealistic pall of grey. First heard about this through a nice interview on "The Reading Lists" by A.J. Jacobs: https://www.thereadinglists.com/aj-jacobs-interview/ ( )

not permanent, pervasive and personal. ( )

This is an excellent book for somebody who needs to enhance their overall outlook and particularly if they're going through a rough scenario in work or relationships. A number of the techniques during this book have already helped me through some low points. ( )

Is the glass half empty or half full? Seligman attempts to provide tools to help change the habitual pessimistic self talk to something that's more realistic and hopeful. I found the included test hard to follow as they asked us to analyze the answers. ( )

Learned Optimism is exactly what it sounds like. Dr. Seligman teaches you how to identify your explanatory style in positive or negative situations---how you explain them to yourself---and identifies three broad axes in terms of their perceived permanence, pervasiveness, and personalization.

I would quibble a bit with the quiz to test your own optimism (as I often do with these sorts of things), where one of the questions to test whether you personalize good events is whether you'd be more likely upon winning the lottery to tell yourself it was pure chance, or you picked the right numbers. Not taking credit for "picking the right numbers" doesn't make me a pessimist, it makes me a realist; it's the lottery, by definition it was pure chance!

Leaving that aside, Seligman acknowledges that the personalization of one's explanations is less significant and useful than the pervasiveness and particularly the permanence, which amounts to what Carol Dweck calls Mindset in her book of the same name. And he shows you how to change your mindset across these three dimensions, developing what he calls "flexible optimism" so you can deploy it selectively as appropriate to the situation. For example, you want to be optimistic in most situations, especially those requiring you to call on deeper reserves and in which a pessimistic outlook can only harm your outcome, such as dealing with health problems. But in certain situations, such as those where the failure mode is particularly bad, it's helpful to adopt a pessimistic approach at least provisionally in order to ask what could go wrong and figure out how to prevent that (such as surgeons and pilots going through their pre-op or pre-flight checklists every time rather than just assuming that everything is probably going to be okay). This is very useful material.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R2P611EX5GJM4S ( )

I learned, in reading this book, that I am a pessimist. This came as news to me, since I'd always thought of myself as an optimist. But optimism - at least not as Seligman defines it - is not a soft-focus view of the world, where you believe that if you just do the right thing, everything will work out in due time. (That's magical thinking - something Seligman addresses without naming it. I learned an expensive lesson in thinking this way in grad school.) I come from a family of pessimists, so I wasn't even aware I thought this way. It's amazing how unchallenged thoughts can guide a person's life.

But this book hit so many points for me: the churning, negative thoughts that never let me alone, the failures that haunt me at four o'clock in the morning, the way I can blow minor issues completely out of proportion, the way I can make the fear of failure a self-fulfilling prophesy, the way I can give up or collapse internally when things go wrong. Oh, and the way I internalize criticism and make it permanent inside me, like a stone. Oh, I've done all these things, and more, which makes me realize I'm a dyed-in-the-wool pessimist. (I'm now wincing at the amount of time I spent on a barstool in my twenties, regaling my problems to friends and anyone else who would listen. But it's nice to finally put a name to the feeling.)

These things are universal. Every adult goes through them. I've had to learn the hard way that a big factor in deciding whether you fail or succeed is how you talk to yourself, especially when things go wrong. This is a good book to read if you're one of those people who frequently needs friends and relatives to "talk you down from the ledge." You can build the skill of thinking optimistically yourself, without putting that burden on other people - AND without discounting some of the very real benefits of pessimism.

In other words, Seligman doesn't define optimism as high self-esteem, or the power of positive thinking, or any nonsense. It's really just correcting a disordered way of thinking - all of the negative beliefs a person can hold without challenging them. If it came from you, it must be true, right? WRONG. So wrong. Say you want to write a novel. If writing a novel seems shrouded in mystery, if you have a deep pessimism that you can never hold back the curtain in writing it, you'll fulfill that prophesy. You'll get the same results as if you really didn't have the ability. Either you'll give up somewhere along the way, or you'll write a crappy book.

Optimism is endurance. That's all. This book can give you some tools for retraining. ( )

"What is crucial is what you think when you fail, using the power of 'non-negative thinking.' Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism." —this is my favorite quote from Seligman's Learned Optimism. And when I sum up the book for others I use a variation of this sentiment, saying something like, "When you experience failure or some form of life not going your way, what explanation do you give yourself? Not what you would say in front of others, but privately?" This is the foundation of your self-esteem, a way of knowing if you're more of an optimist or a pessimist.

Seligman's book reads like a textbook in parts which makes for some uneven reading, and at other times he shifts into memoir-mode, sharing events that shaped his career in psychology. Too much of this pulls the reader away from the core message. And that message, a powerful one that is described right in the title, is this: You need not be a passive observer to the events of your life. Most things that happen are out of your control, but your reaction to them can be very much in your control. And that's a skill to be learned and developed. ( )

I've been fascinated with happiness in the last five years, so it seems obvious that this book, now considered a classic in the field, would be a book I should read.

And now that I have, I must say that I agree with the crown that has been placed upon this book's head; it's a worthy read for anyone interested in happiness.

I took away from it a paradoxical and disquieting idea: the happiest people are the most optimistic, but fail again and again to see the dark truths in life, while the unhappiest people are able to see and act on the grimmer life truths yet suffer deeply from the sadnesses that looking at reality brings.

What do you do with that?

Seligman encourages us to use optimism in most everyday situations, to keep us buoyed up, to face the daily difficulties of life, but to weigh in with realism in situations that could endanger our physical existences.

I have heard that Seligman has a new edition of this book (this is a library book, copyright 1991) which I probably need to seek out. I am also interested in reading his book entitled Flourish. ( )

Be an optimist and you can outperform pessimists. More money, more success, better health; just blame others for your failures and perservere. Science proves it. A much better writer than Beck, Seligman is also more moral than Zimbardo, but Seligman is one of the reasons that we have institutional review boards. But then, what would you expect from a Phillies fan. ( )

Seligman's lifelong professional interest has focused on helplessness and its relationship to pessimism, depression, anxiety and self-esteem After many studies and controlled experiments, he designed a "system" which he calls learned optimism, which basically provides a structure so that one can actually assess the reality of one's situation, be it a seething anger regarding a co-worker, or an overall sense of failure. Two chapters of the book are devoted to this system which is easy to learn, to use and consistently helps one through internal and external tangled webs of sticky negativism.

I first used the "system" 15 years ago, and since then it has been a tonic for me whenever I slip into muddled thinking. I highly recommend this book! ( )

A good book that highlights the roles optimism/pessimism play in people's lives. It has some techniques to change from pessimism to optimism none of them earth shattering - just common sense basically arguing with yourself in favor of yourself. Some interesting studies are quoted and also a few references to psycho-history from the Asimov Foundation series which I thought was great as this is a favorite of mine. Worth a read. ( )

Robert A. Fox Leadership Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania
Pros: important take on an interesting topic; academic style; ample evidence and precise reasoning; practical assessment tools
Cons: too much "selling" of the idea and indulgence in academic competition; the solution is weak and not very insightful (perhaps that is the reality) ( )

4 ( )

"[The author], Martin E. P. Seligman, Ph.D., professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and past president of The American Psychological Association is a leading motivational expert and an authority on learned helplessness. He is the director of the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. [He has written other books in this subject area]." Source: The book's pre-page.Dr. Aaron T. Beck, author of "Love Is Never Enough," said of this work, "Dr. Seligman makes an optimistic case for optimism; you can learn it, you can measure it, you can teach it, and you will be healthier and happier for it." This books is well-indexed.