Prev week
Week of 21 July 2014
Next week
That week's recommended article & book
Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Lif
International Business

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Lif

Martin Seligman

Why we recommend this book

Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life by Martin Seligman. Where Brown covers the emotional and relational dimensions of shame and its recovery, Seligman covers the cognitive mechanism that determines whether failure is experienced as a permanent and global verdict or as a temporary and specific setback. Seligman’s research on explanatory style — the habitual way in which people explain adverse events to themselves — documents that the difference between permanent attribution (“I always fail at this”) and temporary attribution (“this specific approach did not work in this context”) is one of the most powerful predictors of whether people recover from failure and attempt again. For the entrepreneur in a high-shame failure culture, where the cultural environment is pressing the permanent and global attribution automatically, Seligman’s research-grounded account of how explanatory style is formed, how it can be changed, and what the cognitive practices of more accurate and more recoverable failure attribution look like provides the most practically useful counter to the cultural shame pressure that the article documents as the primary barrier to trying again.

Nothing published this week yet. Check back soon or browse all articles.

Previous weeks
Browse Categories
Preferences saved