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When I was President of the American
Psychological Association,

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they tried to media-train me.

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And an encounter I had with CNN summarizes

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what I'm going to be talking about today,

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which is the eleventh reason
to be optimistic.

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The editor of Discover told us 10 of them;

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I'm going to give you the eleventh.

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So they came to me, CNN,
and they said, "Professor Seligman --

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would you tell us about the state
of psychology today?

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We'd like to interview you about that."

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And I said, "Great."

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And she said, "But this is CNN,
so you only get a sound bite."

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I said, "Well, how many words do I get?"

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And she said, "Well, one."

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(Laughter)

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And the cameras rolled, and she said,

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"Professor Seligman,
what is the state of psychology today?"

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"Good."

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(Laughter)

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"Cut! Cut. That won't do.

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We'd really better give
you a longer sound bite."

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"How many words do I get this time?"

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"Well, you get two."

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(Laughter)

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"Doctor Seligman, what is the state
of psychology today?"

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"Not good."

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(Laughter)

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"Look, Doctor Seligman,

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we can see you're really
not comfortable in this medium.

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We'd better give you a real sound bite.

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This time you can have three words.

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Professor Seligman, what is the state
of psychology today?"

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"Not good enough."

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That's what I'm going to be talking about.

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I want to say why psychology
was good, why it was not good,

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and how it may become,
in the next 10 years, good enough.

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And by parallel summary, I want to say
the same thing about technology,

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about entertainment and design,

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because I think the issues
are very similar.

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So, why was psychology good?

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Well, for more than 60 years, psychology
worked within the disease model.

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Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane

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and I introduced myself to my seatmate,
and told them what I did,

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they'd move away from me,

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because, quite rightly, they were saying

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psychology is about finding
what's wrong with you.

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Spot the loony.

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And now, when I tell people
what I do, they move toward me.

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What was good about psychology --

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about the $30 billion
investment NIMH made,

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about working in the disease model,

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about what you mean by psychology --

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is that, 60 years ago,
none of the disorders were treatable;

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it was entirely smoke and mirrors.

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And now, 14 of the disorders
are treatable,

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two of them actually curable.

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And the other thing that happened
is that a science developed,

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a science of mental illness.

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We found out we could take fuzzy concepts

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like depression, alcoholism,

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and measure them with rigor;

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that we could create a classification
of the mental illnesses;

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that we could understand
the causality of the mental illnesses.

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We could look across time
at the same people --

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people, for example, who were genetically
vulnerable to schizophrenia --

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and ask what the contribution
of mothering, of genetics are,

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and we could isolate third variables

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by doing experiments
on the mental illnesses.

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And best of all, we were able,
in the last 50 years,

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to invent drug treatments
and psychological treatments.

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And then we were able
to test them rigorously,

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in random-assignment,
placebo-controlled designs,

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throw out the things that didn't work,

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keep the things that actively did.

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The conclusion of that is,

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psychology and psychiatry
of the last 60 years

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can actually claim that we can make
miserable people less miserable.

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And I think that's terrific.

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I'm proud of it.

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But what was not good,
the consequences of that,

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were three things.

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The first was moral;

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that psychologists and psychiatrists
became victimologists, pathologizers;

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that our view of human nature
was that if you were in trouble,

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bricks fell on you.

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And we forgot that people
made choices and decisions.

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We forgot responsibility.

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That was the first cost.

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The second cost was
that we forgot about you people.

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We forgot about improving normal lives.

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We forgot about a mission to make
relatively untroubled people happier,

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more fulfilled, more productive.

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And "genius," "high-talent,"
became a dirty word.

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No one works on that.

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And the third problem
about the disease model is,

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in our rush to do something
about people in trouble,

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in our rush to do something
about repairing damage,

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it never occurred to us
to develop interventions

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to make people happier --
positive interventions.

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So that was not good.

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And so that's what led people
like Nancy Etcoff, Dan Gilbert,

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Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself

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to work in something I call,
"positive psychology,"

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which has three aims.

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The first is that psychology
should be just as concerned

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with human strength
as it is with weakness.

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It should be just as concerned
with building strength

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as with repairing damage.

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It should be interested
in the best things in life.

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And it should be just as concerned

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with making the lives
of normal people fulfilling,

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and with genius,
with nurturing high talent.

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So in the last 10 years
and the hope for the future,

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we've seen the beginnings
of a science of positive psychology,

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a science of what makes life worth living.

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It turns out that we can measure
different forms of happiness.

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And any of you, for free,
can go to that website

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[www.authentichappiness.org]

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and take the entire panoply
of tests of happiness.

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You can ask, how do you stack
up for positive emotion, for meaning,

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for flow, against literally tens
of thousands of other people?

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We created the opposite of the diagnostic
manual of the insanities:

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a classification of the strengths
and virtues that looks at the sex ratio,

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how they're defined, how to diagnose them,

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what builds them
and what gets in their way.

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We found that we could discover
the causation of the positive states,

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the relationship between left
hemispheric activity

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and right hemispheric activity,
as a cause of happiness.

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I've spent my life working
on extremely miserable people,

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and I've asked the question:

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How do extremely miserable people
differ from the rest of you?

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And starting about six years ago,
we asked about extremely happy people.

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How do they differ from the rest of us?

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It turns out there's one way,
very surprising --

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they're not more religious,
they're not in better shape,

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they don't have more money,
they're not better looking,

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they don't have more good events
and fewer bad events.

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The one way in which they differ:
they're extremely social.

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They don't sit in seminars
on Saturday morning.

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(Laughter)

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They don't spend time alone.

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Each of them is in a romantic relationship

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and each has a rich repertoire of friends.

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But watch out here -- this is merely
correlational data, not causal,

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and it's about happiness
in the first, "Hollywood" sense,

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I'm going to talk about,

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happiness of ebullience
and giggling and good cheer.

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And I'm going to suggest to you
that's not nearly enough,

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in just a moment.

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We found we could begin to look
at interventions over the centuries,

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from the Buddha to Tony Robbins.

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About 120 interventions have been proposed
that allegedly make people happy.

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And we find that we've been able
to manualize many of them,

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and we actually carry out

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random-assignment efficacy
and effectiveness studies.

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That is, which ones actually
make people lastingly happier?

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In a couple of minutes, I'll tell you
about some of those results.

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But the upshot of this is that the mission
I want psychology to have,

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in addition to its mission
of curing the mentally ill,

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and in addition to its mission of making
miserable people less miserable,

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is, can psychology actually
make people happier?

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And to ask that question -- "happy"
is not a word I use very much --

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we've had to break it down

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into what I think
is askable about "happy."

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And I believe there are three different --

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I call them "different" because different
interventions build them,

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it's possible to have one
rather than the other --

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three different happy lives.

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The first happy life is the pleasant life.

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This is a life in which you have
as much positive emotion

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as you possibly can,

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and the skills to amplify it.

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The second is a life of engagement:

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a life in your work, your parenting,
your love, your leisure;

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time stops for you.

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That's what Aristotle was talking about.

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And third, the meaningful life.

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I want to say a little bit
about each of those lives

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and what we know about them.

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The first life is the pleasant life,
and it's simply, as best we can find it,

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it's having as many
of the pleasures as you can,

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as much positive emotion as you can,

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and learning the skills -- savoring,
mindfulness -- that amplify them,

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that stretch them over time and space.

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But the pleasant life has three drawbacks,

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and it's why positive psychology
is not happy-ology,

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and why it doesn't end here.

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The first drawback is,
it turns out the pleasant life,

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your experience of positive emotion,

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is about 50 percent heritable,

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and, in fact, not very modifiable.

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So the different tricks
that Matthieu and I and others know

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about increasing the amount
of positive emotion in your life

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are 15 to 20 percent tricks,
getting more of it.

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Second is that positive
emotion habituates.

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It habituates rapidly, indeed.

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It's all like French vanilla ice cream:

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the first taste is 100 percent;

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by the time you're down
to the sixth taste,

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it's gone.

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And, as I said,
it's not particularly malleable.

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And this leads to the second life.

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I have to tell you about my friend Len,

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to talk about why positive psychology
is more than positive emotion,

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more than building pleasure.

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In two of the three great arenas
of life, by the time Len was 30,

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Len was enormously successful.

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The first arena was work.

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By the time he was 20,
he was an options trader.

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By the time he was 25,
he was a multimillionaire

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and the head of an options
trading company.

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Second, in play, he's a national
champion bridge player.

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But in the third great arena of life,
love, Len is an abysmal failure.

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And the reason he was,
was that Len is a cold fish.

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(Laughter)

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Len is an introvert.

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American women said to Len,
when he dated them,

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"You're no fun. You don't have
positive emotion. Get lost."

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And Len was wealthy enough to be able
to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst,

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who for five years tried
to find the sexual trauma

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that had somehow locked
positive emotion inside of him.

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But it turned out there wasn't
any sexual trauma.

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It turned out that --

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Len grew up in Long Island

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and he played football
and watched football, and played bridge.

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Len is in the bottom five percent
of what we call positive affectivities.

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The question is: Is Len unhappy?

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And I want to say, not.

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Contrary to what psychology told us

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about the bottom 50 percent
of the human race in positive affectivity,

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I think Len is one
of the happiest people I know.

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He's not consigned
to the hell of unhappiness,

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and that's because Len, like most of you,

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is enormously capable of flow.

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When he walks onto the floor
of the American Exchange

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at 9:30 in the morning,

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time stops for him.

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And it stops till the closing bell.

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When the first card is played
till 10 days later,

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when the tournament is over,

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time stops for Len.

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And this is indeed
what Mike Csikszentmihalyi

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has been talking about, about flow.

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And it's distinct from pleasure
in a very important way:

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00:13:28,239 --> 00:13:33,643
pleasure has raw feel -- you know
it's happening; it's thought and feeling.

246
00:13:33,667 --> 00:13:36,756
But what Mike told you
yesterday -- during flow ...

247
00:13:38,919 --> 00:13:41,024
you can't feel anything.

248
00:13:42,572 --> 00:13:44,223
You're one with the music.

249
00:13:44,664 --> 00:13:45,917
Time stops.

250
00:13:45,941 --> 00:13:47,835
You have intense concentration.

251
00:13:47,859 --> 00:13:52,610
And this is indeed the characteristic
of what we think of as the good life.

252
00:13:53,102 --> 00:13:55,887
And we think there's a recipe for it,

253
00:13:55,911 --> 00:13:58,505
and it's knowing what
your highest strengths are --

254
00:13:58,529 --> 00:14:00,823
again, there's a valid test

255
00:14:00,847 --> 00:14:03,230
of what your five highest strengths are --

256
00:14:03,254 --> 00:14:05,983
and then re-crafting your life

257
00:14:06,007 --> 00:14:09,267
to use them as much as you possibly can.

258
00:14:09,291 --> 00:14:11,976
Re-crafting your work, your love,

259
00:14:12,000 --> 00:14:14,757
your play, your friendship,
your parenting.

260
00:14:14,781 --> 00:14:16,361
Just one example.

261
00:14:17,088 --> 00:14:20,696
One person I worked with
was a bagger at Genuardi's.

262
00:14:21,156 --> 00:14:22,321
Hated the job.

263
00:14:22,345 --> 00:14:24,238
She's working her way through college.

264
00:14:24,769 --> 00:14:27,904
Her highest strength
was social intelligence.

265
00:14:27,928 --> 00:14:32,643
So she re-crafted bagging
to make the encounter with her

266
00:14:32,667 --> 00:14:35,438
the social highlight
of every customer's day.

267
00:14:35,922 --> 00:14:37,638
Now, obviously she failed.

268
00:14:37,662 --> 00:14:40,976
But what she did was to take
her highest strengths,

269
00:14:41,000 --> 00:14:44,408
and re-craft work to use them
as much as possible.

270
00:14:45,000 --> 00:14:47,348
What you get out of that
is not smiley-ness.

271
00:14:47,372 --> 00:14:49,275
You don't look like Debbie Reynolds.

272
00:14:49,299 --> 00:14:50,703
You don't giggle a lot.

273
00:14:50,727 --> 00:14:53,313
What you get is more absorption.

274
00:14:54,000 --> 00:14:56,074
So, that's the second path.

275
00:14:56,098 --> 00:14:58,450
The first path, positive emotion;

276
00:14:58,474 --> 00:15:01,570
the second path is eudaemonian flow;

277
00:15:01,594 --> 00:15:03,976
and the third path is meaning.

278
00:15:04,000 --> 00:15:07,976
This is the most venerable
of the happinesses, traditionally.

279
00:15:08,000 --> 00:15:11,499
And meaning, in this view, consists of --

280
00:15:11,523 --> 00:15:14,443
very parallel to eudaemonia --

281
00:15:14,467 --> 00:15:18,030
it consists of knowing
what your highest strengths are,

282
00:15:18,054 --> 00:15:22,697
and using them to belong to
and in the service of

283
00:15:22,721 --> 00:15:24,864
something larger than you are.

284
00:15:26,922 --> 00:15:30,174
I mentioned that for all three
kinds of lives --

285
00:15:31,247 --> 00:15:34,590
the pleasant life, the good life,
the meaningful life --

286
00:15:34,614 --> 00:15:36,778
people are now
hard at work on the question:

287
00:15:36,802 --> 00:15:40,729
Are there things that lastingly
change those lives?

288
00:15:41,768 --> 00:15:44,767
And the answer seems to be yes.

289
00:15:44,791 --> 00:15:47,346
And I'll just give you some samples of it.

290
00:15:47,370 --> 00:15:49,534
It's being done in a rigorous manner.

291
00:15:49,558 --> 00:15:52,395
It's being done in the same way
that we test drugs

292
00:15:52,419 --> 00:15:54,028
to see what really works.

293
00:15:54,513 --> 00:15:59,326
So we do random-assignment,
placebo-controlled,

294
00:15:59,350 --> 00:16:02,197
long-term studies
of different interventions.

295
00:16:02,221 --> 00:16:06,726
Just to sample the kind of interventions
that we find have an effect:

296
00:16:06,750 --> 00:16:09,976
when we teach people
about the pleasant life,

297
00:16:10,000 --> 00:16:11,976
how to have more pleasure in your life,

298
00:16:12,000 --> 00:16:16,019
one of your assignments
is to take the mindfulness skills,

299
00:16:16,043 --> 00:16:18,458
the savoring skills,

300
00:16:18,482 --> 00:16:21,240
and you're assigned
to design a beautiful day.

301
00:16:22,173 --> 00:16:27,187
Next Saturday, set a day aside,
design yourself a beautiful day,

302
00:16:27,211 --> 00:16:31,405
and use savoring and mindfulness
to enhance those pleasures.

303
00:16:31,429 --> 00:16:35,930
And we can show in that way
that the pleasant life is enhanced.

304
00:16:37,738 --> 00:16:38,962
Gratitude visit.

305
00:16:41,083 --> 00:16:43,739
I want you all to do this
with me now, if you would.

306
00:16:43,763 --> 00:16:45,011
Close your eyes.

307
00:16:46,812 --> 00:16:51,156
I'd like you to remember someone

308
00:16:51,180 --> 00:16:54,228
who did something enormously important

309
00:16:54,252 --> 00:16:57,976
that changed your life
in a good direction,

310
00:16:58,000 --> 00:16:59,933
and who you never properly thanked.

311
00:17:01,147 --> 00:17:02,636
The person has to be alive.

312
00:17:04,000 --> 00:17:06,163
Now, OK, you can open your eyes.

313
00:17:06,187 --> 00:17:08,521
I hope all of you have such a person.

314
00:17:08,545 --> 00:17:12,143
Your assignment, when you're learning
the gratitude visit,

315
00:17:12,167 --> 00:17:15,816
is to write a 300-word
testimonial to that person,

316
00:17:16,534 --> 00:17:18,463
call them on the phone in Phoenix,

317
00:17:19,161 --> 00:17:21,808
ask if you can visit, don't tell them why.

318
00:17:21,832 --> 00:17:23,335
Show up at their door,

319
00:17:24,299 --> 00:17:28,296
you read the testimonial --
everyone weeps when this happens.

320
00:17:29,579 --> 00:17:32,481
And what happens is, when we test people

321
00:17:32,505 --> 00:17:35,624
one week later, a month later,
three months later,

322
00:17:35,648 --> 00:17:38,306
they're both happier and less depressed.

323
00:17:39,722 --> 00:17:42,057
Another example is a strengths date,

324
00:17:42,081 --> 00:17:46,263
in which we get couples to identify
their highest strengths

325
00:17:46,287 --> 00:17:47,662
on the strengths test,

326
00:17:47,686 --> 00:17:52,767
and then to design an evening
in which they both use their strengths.

327
00:17:52,791 --> 00:17:56,284
We find this is a strengthener
of relationships.

328
00:17:56,788 --> 00:17:58,762
And fun versus philanthropy.

329
00:17:58,786 --> 00:18:01,506
It's so heartening
to be in a group like this,

330
00:18:01,530 --> 00:18:05,130
in which so many of you have turned
your lives to philanthropy.

331
00:18:05,154 --> 00:18:08,812
Well, my undergraduates and the people
I work with haven't discovered this,

332
00:18:08,836 --> 00:18:11,644
so we actually have people
do something altruistic

333
00:18:12,422 --> 00:18:14,086
and do something fun,

334
00:18:14,197 --> 00:18:15,351
and contrast it.

335
00:18:15,375 --> 00:18:17,976
And what you find
is when you do something fun,

336
00:18:18,000 --> 00:18:19,889
it has a square wave walk set.

337
00:18:19,913 --> 00:18:23,549
When you do something philanthropic
to help another person,

338
00:18:23,573 --> 00:18:25,662
it lasts and it lasts.

339
00:18:26,526 --> 00:18:30,046
So those are examples
of positive interventions.

340
00:18:30,680 --> 00:18:34,096
So the next to last thing
I want to say is:

341
00:18:35,000 --> 00:18:38,119
we're interested in how much
life satisfaction people have.

342
00:18:38,143 --> 00:18:40,083
This is really what you're about.

343
00:18:40,107 --> 00:18:41,976
And that's our target variable.

344
00:18:42,000 --> 00:18:45,976
And we ask the question as a function
of the three different lives,

345
00:18:46,000 --> 00:18:48,216
how much life satisfaction do you get?

346
00:18:48,747 --> 00:18:51,852
So we ask -- and we've done this
in 15 replications,

347
00:18:51,876 --> 00:18:54,254
involving thousands of people:

348
00:18:54,278 --> 00:18:56,773
To what extent does
the pursuit of pleasure,

349
00:18:56,797 --> 00:18:58,569
the pursuit of positive emotion,

350
00:18:59,143 --> 00:19:00,317
the pleasant life,

351
00:19:00,341 --> 00:19:03,749
the pursuit of engagement,
time stopping for you,

352
00:19:03,773 --> 00:19:07,147
and the pursuit of meaning
contribute to life satisfaction?

353
00:19:07,171 --> 00:19:10,765
And our results surprised us;
they were backward of what we thought.

354
00:19:10,789 --> 00:19:14,293
It turns out the pursuit of pleasure
has almost no contribution

355
00:19:14,317 --> 00:19:15,976
to life satisfaction.

356
00:19:16,000 --> 00:19:18,529
The pursuit of meaning is the strongest.

357
00:19:18,553 --> 00:19:22,700
The pursuit of engagement
is also very strong.

358
00:19:23,000 --> 00:19:27,634
Where pleasure matters
is if you have both engagement

359
00:19:27,658 --> 00:19:29,267
and you have meaning,

360
00:19:29,291 --> 00:19:31,580
then pleasure's the whipped
cream and the cherry.

361
00:19:31,604 --> 00:19:38,122
Which is to say, the full life --
the sum is greater than the parts,

362
00:19:38,146 --> 00:19:39,552
if you've got all three.

363
00:19:39,576 --> 00:19:42,818
Conversely, if you have none
of the three, the empty life,

364
00:19:42,842 --> 00:19:44,499
the sum is less than the parts.

365
00:19:44,523 --> 00:19:48,774
And what we're asking now is:
Does the very same relationship --

366
00:19:48,798 --> 00:19:53,741
physical health, morbidity,
how long you live and productivity --

367
00:19:53,765 --> 00:19:55,174
follow the same relationship?

368
00:19:55,198 --> 00:19:57,676
That is, in a corporation,

369
00:19:57,700 --> 00:20:03,539
is productivity a function of positive
emotion, engagement and meaning?

370
00:20:03,563 --> 00:20:06,730
Is health a function
of positive engagement,

371
00:20:06,754 --> 00:20:09,491
of pleasure, and of meaning in life?

372
00:20:09,515 --> 00:20:13,730
And there is reason to think the answer
to both of those may well be yes.

373
00:20:16,204 --> 00:20:20,633
So, Chris said that the last
speaker had a chance

374
00:20:20,657 --> 00:20:23,078
to try to integrate what he heard,

375
00:20:23,102 --> 00:20:24,808
and so this was amazing for me.

376
00:20:24,832 --> 00:20:28,126
I've never been in a gathering like this.

377
00:20:28,801 --> 00:20:32,525
I've never seen speakers stretch
beyond themselves so much,

378
00:20:32,549 --> 00:20:34,621
which was one of the remarkable things.

379
00:20:35,000 --> 00:20:38,976
But I found that the problems
of psychology seemed to be parallel

380
00:20:39,000 --> 00:20:43,215
to the problems of technology,
entertainment and design

381
00:20:43,239 --> 00:20:44,714
in the following way:

382
00:20:44,738 --> 00:20:48,220
we all know that technology,
entertainment and design

383
00:20:48,244 --> 00:20:53,244
have been and can be used
for destructive purposes.

384
00:20:54,371 --> 00:20:58,526
We also know that technology,
entertainment and design

385
00:20:58,550 --> 00:21:01,069
can be used to relieve misery.

386
00:21:01,551 --> 00:21:04,976
And by the way, the distinction
between relieving misery

387
00:21:05,000 --> 00:21:07,976
and building happiness
is extremely important.

388
00:21:08,000 --> 00:21:11,611
I thought, when I first became
a therapist 30 years ago,

389
00:21:11,635 --> 00:21:16,976
that if I was good enough
to make someone not depressed,

390
00:21:17,000 --> 00:21:20,048
not anxious, not angry,

391
00:21:20,867 --> 00:21:22,333
that I'd make them happy.

392
00:21:22,902 --> 00:21:24,277
And I never found that;

393
00:21:24,301 --> 00:21:26,323
I found the best you could ever do

394
00:21:26,347 --> 00:21:27,749
was to get to zero;

395
00:21:28,350 --> 00:21:29,564
that they were empty.

396
00:21:29,588 --> 00:21:35,194
And it turns out the skills of happiness,
the skills of the pleasant life,

397
00:21:35,218 --> 00:21:37,589
the skills of engagement,
the skills of meaning,

398
00:21:37,613 --> 00:21:41,764
are different from the skills
of relieving misery.

399
00:21:42,335 --> 00:21:47,706
And so, the parallel thing holds
with technology, entertainment

400
00:21:47,730 --> 00:21:49,303
and design, I believe.

401
00:21:49,327 --> 00:21:56,206
That is, it is possible
for these three drivers of our world

402
00:21:56,230 --> 00:21:58,445
to increase happiness,

403
00:21:58,758 --> 00:22:01,646
to increase positive emotion.

404
00:22:01,670 --> 00:22:03,857
And that's typically
how they've been used.

405
00:22:03,881 --> 00:22:06,491
But once you fractionate
happiness the way I do --

406
00:22:06,903 --> 00:22:09,976
not just positive emotion,
that's not nearly enough --

407
00:22:10,000 --> 00:22:13,133
there's flow in life,
and there's meaning in life.

408
00:22:13,506 --> 00:22:14,976
As Laura Lee told us,

409
00:22:15,000 --> 00:22:18,668
design and, I believe,
entertainment and technology,

410
00:22:18,692 --> 00:22:23,423
can be used to increase meaning
engagement in life as well.

411
00:22:23,447 --> 00:22:25,067
So in conclusion,

412
00:22:25,091 --> 00:22:27,518
the eleventh reason for optimism,

413
00:22:27,542 --> 00:22:30,717
in addition to the space elevator,

414
00:22:30,741 --> 00:22:35,872
is that I think with technology,
entertainment and design,

415
00:22:35,896 --> 00:22:39,644
we can actually increase
the amount of tonnage

416
00:22:39,668 --> 00:22:41,918
of human happiness on the planet.

417
00:22:42,521 --> 00:22:46,784
And if technology can,
in the next decade or two,

418
00:22:46,808 --> 00:22:50,672
increase the pleasant life,
the good life and the meaningful life,

419
00:22:50,696 --> 00:22:52,186
it will be good enough.

420
00:22:52,210 --> 00:22:57,815
If entertainment can be diverted
to also increase positive emotion,

421
00:22:57,967 --> 00:23:01,061
meaning eudaemonia,

422
00:23:01,085 --> 00:23:02,524
it will be good enough.

423
00:23:02,548 --> 00:23:07,114
And if design can increase
positive emotion,

424
00:23:08,582 --> 00:23:11,577
eudaemonia, and flow and meaning,

425
00:23:11,601 --> 00:23:15,140
what we're all doing together
will become good enough.

426
00:23:15,164 --> 00:23:16,343
Thank you.

427
00:23:16,367 --> 00:23:22,169
(Applause)