Positive Psychology Founder: How To Stop Your Negative Thoughts - Martin Seligman - #1167

“to change from being an optimist to a pessimist. And part of the reason for wanting to talk about the book agency is I'd like people to read about this as well. Here's something I've done with 40,000 drill sergeants in the United States Army.”

“What's the relationship between optimism and agency? Agency, your new obsession, this is a new book. How is it different from optimism? How have you come to conceptualize that? Yeah, so for me, agency has three components, and optimism is the second one.”

“and imagine that if there's a large range of goals that I can accomplish. And the reason that expanded view of agency, beyond just optimism, matters, is at the heart of the new book, and that's human history. And when does human innovation occur?”

“comes across cultures and across time and place. so uh what uh the book agency is about it takes the human condition from hunter-gatherers through agriculture through homer uh uh through the greeks through the middle ages, through the reformation and the renaissance, and through modern times, and asks the question, when do human beings flourish and when do they stagnate?”

“And let me give you two examples of this. I've been working on this book of agency for seven years. It's been a lot of work. Chapter eight is about China. So I had looked at the West and found that the more agentic people were, the more progress there was.”

“maybe 100 people have read in a very obscure journal. Well, my favorite book of yours is What You Can Change and What You Can't. And maybe not quite as obscure, but that I took the behavioral genetics red pill.”

“And what areas should I focus on? And the agency book's great, but what you can change and what you can't for me was just so, even if it is one of your more niche books, it was wonderful, like really, really fantastic.”

“Well, there were almost none. And in fact, what I said in the book, What You Can Change and What You Can't, that's pretty much remained the same. So psychotherapy and drugs work decently well on some things and don't work at all on others.”

“I reread it recently. It must be 25 years old or so. I had written five editions of abnormal psychology. So every five years, I had to revise the textbook with new discoveries.”

“And indeed, in 1524, the leading Catholic theologian Erasmus writes a major article called On the Freedom of the Will. And it basically says we're like toddlers.”

“just Homer, the Greeks, if you look at the older Homer, which is the Iliad, in which Achilles doesn't do it, but the gods get Achilles to do it.”

“But one major hypothesis, this is of Julian Jaynes' wonderful book called The Bicameral Mind about 50 years ago. He was a teacher of Bon.”