mists are more productive at certain jobs—one company made sales-force hiring decisions based partially on the outcome of psychological tests. (People who tend to see themselves as responsible for positive situations are more resilient and more likely to bear up under repeated rejection.) And researchers have found that optimists are less likely to develop cancer or to die from heart disease.
Where are all these sunny-side uppers? Jeffrey E. Garten, dean of the Yale School of Management, interviewed 40 of the world's most successful business executives for his book The Mind of the CEO. Garten found every last one of them to be extremely optimistic. "I didn't find a lot of other common traits," he says. "For example, there's a conventional wisdom that these are all alpha people who exude aggressiveness and do nothing in life besides work. I didn't find that. But the one thing they had in common was how they all talked about the mountains they had to climb every single day." His subjects kept a perspective on the tasks at hand by placing them within a larger, long-term vision. "Their view was, I know I have succeeded in the past, and I'm quite confident that if I can look beyond today's problems to a point on the horizon, I know I'm going to get there."
How do people turn out this way? Lifelong optimism can be explained in one of three ways, says Seligman. About 50 percent is due to inheritable conditions, he says. Seligman circulated a questionnaire at an annual twins convention (in Twinsburg, Ohio) and found identical twins more similar than fraternals in levels of optimism and pessimism. "You might think that means there is an optimism gene," Seligman says. "But I don't think so. Identical twins are also similar in terms of physical traits: how they look, what talents they have—the things that can attract people to you and make you successful in life. And we know success tends to produce optimism and failure tends to produce pessimism."
Another source, Seligman says, is a person's mother: "There's a markedly high correlation between your level of optimism and your mother's, but not your father's." Although no one knows why this is, one hypothesis is that mothers still tend to be primary caretakers and therefore have a greater influence on their offspring. Another theory is that women have evolved to be more cerebral and expressive, so they're more likely to communicate their outlook, positive or negative.
"The third source is the reality of the bad events that happen to you," says Seligman. "If you want to be an athlete but you're born clumsy, you're likely to expect one setback after another. A sequence of failures naturally leads to the expectation of failure."
According to Seligman, almost everyone can learn how to be more optimistic, except, perhaps, those who are severely depressed and may benefit only from professional counseling or medication. A key component of optimism seems to be a willingness to look for the bright side, even if that means distorting reality. You can also begin to recognize and catalog the negative messages you tell yourself, then dispute those thoughts as if debating an external foe. Gradually, the new responses become automatic. (Get more exercises to improve your sense of optimism.)
Even though he teaches techniques for learning optimism, Seligman warns that no one should think of it as a panacea. "It doesn't give you wisdom, compassion, or a direct line to the truth," he says. Seligman advocates a "flexible optimism," which factors in risk, rather than a blind faith in positive outcomes. You don't want an overly optimistic pilot to look out the cockpit and say, "Oh, the weather doesn't look so bad from here. Let's not bother deicing the plane."