Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life

In this chapter, Seligman connects optimism with professional success, particularly in high-stakes environments like business and sales. He begins with an encounter with a man named John Leslie, a persistent and optimistic executive who embodied the belief that confidence and faith in others can drive extraordinary creativity. Leslie’s leadership style, optimistic and grounded in trust, serves as an entry point for Seligman’s investigation of explanatory style in the workplace.

Seligman contrasts optimists and pessimists in professional settings. Optimists, he argues, are more likely to persevere in the face of rejection and failure. Pessimists, in contrast, tend to give up quickly and assume that failures are personal and lasting. This mindset difference has measurable consequences: Research in the insurance industry, for instance, showed that optimistic salespeople far outperformed pessimists, selling significantly more and surviving longer in difficult roles. He describes how the company MetLife adopted optimism testing in its hiring practices. Using the Attributional Style Questionnaire, researchers were able to predict which applicants would thrive despite the inevitable rejection of sales work. Optimists consistently stayed the course, while pessimists quit more frequently. In emphasizing optimism as a tangible, testable predictor of workplace success, Seligman reflects a late-20th-century trend toward applying psychological insights to the workplace with the goal of optimizing productivity.