Martin E. P. Seligman - Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

This book will help you flourish.

There, I have finally said it.

I have spent my professional life avoiding unguarded promises like this one. I am a research scientist, and a conservative one at that. The appeal of what I write comes from the fact that it is grounded in careful science: statistical tests, validated questionnaires, thoroughly researched exercises, and large, representative samples. In contrast to pop psychology and the bulk of self-improvement, my writings are believable because of the underlying science.

My thinking about the goal of psychology has changed since I published my last book ( Authentic Happiness, 2002) and, even better, psychology itself is also changing. I have spent most of my life working on psychologys venerable goal of relieving misery and uprooting the disabling conditions of life. Truth be told, this can be a drag. Taking the psychology of misery to heartas you must when you work on depression, alcoholism, schizophrenia, trauma, and the panoply of suffering that makes up psychology-as-usuals primary materialcan be a vexation to the soul. While we do more than our bit to increase the well-being of our clients, psychology-as-usual typically does not do much for the well-being of its practitioners. If anything changes in the practitioner, it is a personality shift toward depression.

I have been part of a tectonic upheaval in psychology called positive psychology, a scientific and professional movement. In 1998, as president of the American Psychological Association (APA), I urged psychology to supplement its venerable goal with a new goal: exploring what makes life worth living and building the enabling conditions of a life worth living. The goal of understanding well-being and building the enabling conditions of life is by no means identical with the goal of understanding misery and undoing the disabling conditions of life. At this moment, several thousand people around the world work in this field and are striving to further these goals. This book narrates their story, or at least the public face of their story.

The private face also needs to be shown. Positive psychology makes people happier. Teaching positive psychology, researching positive psychology, using positive psychology in practice as a coach or therapist, giving positive psychology exercises to tenth graders in a classroom, parenting little kids with positive psychology, teaching drill sergeants how to teach about post-traumatic growth, meeting with other positive psychologists, and just reading about positive psychology all make people happier. The people who work in positive psychology are the people with the highest well-being I have ever known.

The content itselfhappiness, flow, meaning, love, gratitude, accomplishment, growth, better relationshipsconstitutes human flourishing. Learning that you can have more of these things is life changing. Glimpsing the vision of a flourishing human future is life changing.

And so this book will increase your well-beingand it will help you flourish.

The real way positive psychology got its start has been a secret until now. When I was president-elect of the American Psychological Association in 1997, my email tripled. I rarely answer phone calls, and I never do snail mail anymore, but because there is a twenty-four-hour-a-day bridge game on the Internet, I answer my email swiftly and diligently. My replies are just the length that fits the time it takes for my partner to play the hand when I am the dummy. (I am seligman@psych.upenn.edu, and you should feel free to email me if you dont mind one-sentence answers.)

One email that I received in late 1997, however, puzzled me, and I put it into my huh? folder. It said simply, Why dont you come up to see me in New York? and was signed with initials only. A couple of weeks later, I was at a cocktail party with Judy Rodin, then the president of the University of Pennsylvania, where I have taught for forty years. Judy, now the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, was a senior at Penn when I was a first-year graduate student, and we both worked in psychology professor Richard Solomons animal lab. We became fast friends, and I watched with admiration and more than a little envy when Judy zoomed at an astonishingly young age from president of the Eastern Psychological Association, to chairman of psychology at Yale University, to dean, and to provost at Yale, and then to president at Penn. In between, we even managed to collaborate on a study investigating the correlation of optimism with a stronger immune system in senior citizens when Judy headed the MacArthur Foundations massive project on psychoneuroimmunologythe pathways through which psychological events influence neural events which in turn influence immune events.

Do you know a PT who might have sent me an email inviting me to New York? I asked Judy, who knows everybody who is anybody.

Go see him! she gasped.

So two weeks later, I found myself at an unmarked door on the eighth floor of a small, grimy office building in the bowels of lower Manhattan. I was ushered into an undecorated, windowless room in which sat two gray-haired, gray-suited men and one speakerphone.

We are the lawyers for an anonymous foundation, explained one of them, introducing himself as PT. We pick winners, and you are a winner. Wed like to know what research and scholarship you want to do. We dont micromanage. We should warn you at the outset, however, that if you reveal our identity, any funding we give you will stop.