Tag Archives: success

Learned Optimism

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Martin E. Seligman is one of the fathers of the positive psychology movement. His twenty-year-old book, Learned Optimism: How to Change your Mind and your Life, builds on his research on learned helplessness and depression. Learned helplessness, as you probably know, is when individuals internalize that their actions have no effect on their environment and give up trying, even in post-learning situations where their actions would indeed be effectual. Learned Optimism explores how the way that we frame our self-talk around successes and failures determines either our optimism, leading to success, or our pessimism, leading to learned helplessness.

Seligman says there are three elements to one’s explanatory style around life’s highs and lows: permanence (how long causes are believed to last), pervasiveness (how context-specific the causes are believed to be), and personalization (how internal to the individual the causes are believed to be). Optimistic people explain positive experiences in terms of permanent, pervasive, and internal causes, and negative experiences in terms of transient, specific, external causes. In other words, good things happen because of the optimist’s enduring good traits which manifest themselves in most situations, while bad things happen due to very specific, temporary accidents. Pessimists explain events in the opposite way: bad things happen because of their enduring and pervasive bad personal qualities, while good things are specific, temporary, external flukes.

The asymmetry here is interesting, and neither of those two explanatory-style stereotypes seems like something I want to aspire to. Perhaps that’s related to my scoring optimistically when explaining bad events and pessimistically when explaining good ones. In fact, I wonder whether pondering the impermanence of all things and the traps of the ego doesn’t predispose one toward explaining all events this way, as due to accidental, temporary, external causes….

Seligman notes that while optimism is generally the preferable mindset in terms of getting individuals to dream big, act on their dreams, and get over failures, pessimists have a more accurate grasp of reality, and may thus have the more useful mindset for mission-critical applications like surgery, flying airplanes, and accounting. He notes, however, that we can choose to be flexible in employing optimism when it would be useful. His technique for doing this is based on the ABCDE acronym for reframing failures optimistically (interestingly, he does not reframe successes optimistically):

  • Adversity: Some external bad event happens.
  • Beliefs: Our explanatory style leads us to believe in certain causes for the adversity.
  • Consequences: Those causes have consequences: how we respond to the adversity.
  • Disputation: However, we can challenge our pessimistic beliefs using techniques such as seeing whether the evidence lines up, whether there are alternative explanations, what the implications of our beliefs are, and whether our beliefs are useful in any way.
  • Energization (!): As a result, we can feel more in control of our response to the situation.

In essence, the book is largely just a motivational build-up to this technique, whose key step, “disputation,” is nothing other than reframing our internal explanations in a fairer and more useful way.

Raising success

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Part of the American narrative is the story of the self-made person. Work hard, we believe, and success will follow. Some chosen few are natural geniuses and they will rise to the top effortlessly in our level, meritocratic playing field.

We know the truth is not that simple. Accidents of birth and circumstance play a large role in how a life unfolds. It is these accidental circumstances that Malcom Gladwell explores in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. His thesis is that our family, cultural, and social environments provide ever-shifting opportunities for success in a given field. These, of course, are post hoc patterns that he discerns, but his case is compelling:

  • most of the best Canadian hockey players are born in early months of the year, because they are the oldest children in the yearly selection class with a Jan. 1 cutoff;

  • many Silicon Valley titans were born in the mid-1950s, young enough to be part of the computer revolution but not old enough to miss it;

  • the perfect birth date for becoming a successful New York Jewish lawyer is 1930, because one would have belonged to a demographic trough that meant smaller class sizes, one would have had enough time excluded from the prestigious law firms to hone legal skills and grow a professional reputation in a sub-field that would become important in the 1970s, and one would have been able to observe, growing up, one’s immigrant family do meaningful work where assertiveness and extra effort were rewarded

…and so on. Natural talent and hard work matter, of course, but what is also needed are the right sets of opportunities to appear and the initiative or luck to be able to seize them.

The book would make an interesting a child-rearing manual of sorts. Not that it is particularly prescriptive, but Gladwell does identify some common traits of success: putting in enough time to become an expert in something (10,000 hours seems to be the pattern across various fields); cultivating social as well as analytic intelligence; exemplifying for one’s children meaningful work, where the reward increases in relation to the effort put forth; noting how much of the education discrepancy among social classes is due to the availability of learning opportunities in the vacation months.

I recommend this easy but thought-provoking read.