PNTV - Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman

You're listening to Optimize with Brian Johnson. More wisdom in less time. Hey guys, how are you? This is Brian. Welcome to Philosopher's Notes tv episode number four. Today we're going to be covering a fantastic book called Authentic Happiness by a guy named Martin Seligman, who kicked off along with his colleagues, the positive psychology movement. So as always, we're going to be using the Philosopher's Note 6 page PDF as a guide. And we've got 10 minutes to get through. It usually takes me 20 minutes to read into the MP3, so we will get to work. So big idea here. Authentic Happiness. It's one of the books that kicked off the positive psychology movement. And in the year 2000, Martin Seligman and a guy named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who wrote a great book called Flow that we're gonna do later this week, basically said it's time for the psychology movement. He was the president of the American Psychological Association, I think is what it's called. And he said, look, it's time we focus more on positive stuff in psychology. And if you look at the literature in the 20th century, for every 100 articles that were written on the negative aspects of human behavior, things like this is in the scientific psychological literature. For every 100 articles written on negative stuff like schizophrenia, depression, et cetera, there was only one article written on positive stuff like the effects of goal setting and love and appreciation on our lives and self actualization and all that good stuff. So what we found was psychologists got really good at going from negative nine, taking someone from negative nine to negative three to zero. But we didn't have a deep scientific understanding of how to take someone from 0 to plus 3 to plus 9. So that's what positive psychology is all about. So we now know through psychopharmacology, psychotherapy, we can get someone from negative 9 to 0. But how do we take someone from 0 to 9 to 99? Just how far can we go and how can we bring it into a lab and know what works scientifically? As you can tell, I get excited about positive psychology. I studied psychology at UCLA as an undergraduate, thought about getting my PhD in psychology. @ the time they weren't doing anything on this front. Then thought about getting my PhD again. And if I had done so, I would have like to study with Martin Seligman. I actually spent, I don't know what it was, six or 10 weeks in a virtual course with him and about 300 people shortly after this book came out and learned from him about these Ideas, which was really cool. So before I Forget, go to authentichappiness.com authentichappiness.com and take what they call their strengths assessment. I think over a million people have taken it now. It's an awesome tool that we're going to talk about today that will help you discover your five signature strengths, which are going to be really important to understand so we can apply them to our lives more consciously. And they also have a lot of other tests on everything from optimism, gratitude, meaning, of all kinds of other stuff. So really, really cool. Check it out. Authentic happiness, calm. So there we go. We've got the spectrum, right? Negative 9, positive 9 positive. Psychology is all about taking us to the positive 9, positive 99. So how do we do that? Well, Martin Seligman and his colleagues basically said, let's study all the great wisdom literature. And that's where they started. They started studying everything from Confucius and the Bhagavad Gita, Marcus Aurelius and all the classics, the Bushido samurai code. And what they found was that all these great books differ on the details, but they all come back to about six core virtues. So those six core virtues are wisdom, courage, love, justice, temperance, and spirituality. Six core virtues. Wisdom, courage, love, justice, temperance, and spirituality. So we have six core virtues. All of these great wisdom books come back to the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Dhammapada, the Dao de Jing, Confucius, Anilex, all these great books, which, by the way, we have 10 of the old school classics in the philosopher's notes. So check that out in the notes up there if you haven't already. And if you're already subscribed, go check them out. They're awesome. So we've got these six core virtues. And what Seligman and his colleagues asked was, okay, so if these virtues are the keys to living a happy life, how do we help people discover those virtues and then practically apply them to their lives? And what they discovered was those virtues could be distinguished and distilled into strengths that we each embody in different ways in our lives. So the idea was, okay, a strength that we have, and they call it a signature strength, is kind of like a virtue in action, right? So, for example, I think they have 24, 22 or 24 different strengths. I don't have that in front of me, but you can take the test again@authentichappiness.com and you'll discover what your five strengths are, which are really just kind of a more distilled version of the virtues that I just mentioned. The six virtues and what we want to do and what they've discovered scientifically is that to the extent you understand your signature strengths, actually don't even need to understand them, but to the extent that you use your signature strengths often in the routines and aspects and how you live your life, if you use your signature strengths often, you will be happier than those people who don't. Really simple. That's essentially the science of this book. In authentic happiness, know your signature strengths, use them often, you will be happier than if you didn't. And very importantly, know your strengths. Use them often, you'll be happier. Give them to something bigger than yourself, give them to the world and dedicate yourself to something bigger than yourself, and you will have a life that's truly full of meaning. Really cool stuff. So again, go online, check out what your signature strengths are. Then in the note, I talk about my strengths and I talk about how I've created my life very consciously and deliberately over the last six years, such that I'm using these strengths every day in greatest service to the world. So my strengths really quickly are creativity. It's my number one strength. I love creating new things and finding fun ways to do things. Number two, which is one of the reasons why being an accountant earlier in my career wasn't the best thing for me. Probably why I threw up on the way home from work. My first week of work, literally on the 405 freeway here in Los Angeles, pulled over and yacked. Not a pretty situation, but I learned that wasn't for me. And now I'm embracing these strengths and using them more often. Of course you can be creative in any field, but for me, that wasn't quite it. So creativity number one. Strength, number two, hope and optimism. I believe that I can do anything, and I believe that you can as well. We can create our ideal lives. Courage. I love taking risks and creating new businesses and finding new ways to do things and really pushing my edges. Number four, signature strength for me is kindness and generosity. I get a lot out of giving to people. So these shows we have the scholarship program where if anyone can't afford the philosopher's notes, you can get them for free. That's big for me. Anytime I feel myself stressed, I can check in and say, am I contracting a little bit? How do I give myself more and embrace kindness and generosity? Number five, energy and enthusiasm. If you can't tell, I have a little bit of energy, enthusiasm about this stuff. So I want to find a way to Express it often, and I feel most alive. And then wisdom. Those are my six strengths. Actually, I've done the test a couple of times. Those are what came up. So go find out what yours are and ask yourself before you take the test, what are my strengths? I wonder what they would be. And then go take it and see what the science says. It probably won't be anything shocking, but. But it's great to know. And I like to say you want to be able to be awakened at 3am in the morning and people say, what are your strengths? And you can say, this is what I love. This is who I am. This is how I show up in the world. That's pretty cool. That leads to the next big idea of when we embody these strengths and we give them to the world. We're living our calling. He talks about there's three different levels of work. There's having a job, which is kind of like punching a clock. You get paid by the hour, you come in, you punch the clock, you go home, it's a job. Then the next step up is a career. You're no longer punching the clock per se. There's career advancement. You know, you can become vice president. Maybe one day you can become an executive vice president and the CEO. There's a career idea, right? And then the next level is a calling. So you move from job career to calling. Calling is, wow, this is what you're here on this planet to do. Super powerful stuff. It's the idea of Dharma going to come back to again and again and again. So I write a calling description in the note. Not a job description, a calling description for me and the work I do here at Philosopher's Notes. So that's the basic idea. It's really powerful, really simple. Know your strengths, use them often. You're going to be happier if you're not using your strengths. It's like there's this part of you that's not being expressed and that's never a good thing. So we want to give ourselves fully to the world. So again, authentichappiness.com, check it out. See if you can create a calling description for yourself. And if you do the test, I would love it if in the comments you wanted to share them with us. What are your top five signature strengths? And then how are you going to engage them more often in your life? In greatest service to the World. That, my friends, is a very quick look at authentic happiness. Check out the note, check out the book. Hope you enjoyed it and look forward to sharing more with you soon. See.

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