Seligman and the Meaningful Life
March 11th, 2010Martin Seligman at the TED Conference:
Know what your five highest strengths are, recraft your life to use them as much as you can. Recraft your work, your love, your play, your friendship, your parenting.
Know your strengths and use them to belong to, and in the service of something larger than you are.
I think this is such an important notion, often overlooked:
Belong to a community.
Work hard.
Make a difference.
If you have meaning and engagement, pleasure is the whip cream.
As mentioned in the video, Seligman has published a host of positivity tests that assess happiness as well as strengths.
The Strengths Survey test took me about 15 minutes to complete. Here are my current results:
- Curiosity and interest in the world
- Capacity to love and be loved
- Hope, optimism, and future-mindedness
- Love of learning
- Social intelligence
These tests always find a way of using at least 2 top spots to tell me I’m a chronic learner. Funny that.
Posted in Spotlight | Comments (5)
March 12th, 2010 at 11:29 am
#1: I love TED
#2: That Web site has a “Grit Test.” I love that, too.
#3: What do you think Social Intelligence means?
#4: I like the question about prudence, discretion and caution… I think we both know these are not my strengths.
#5: I’m a bad citizen, not kind, not humble/modest, impulsive and imprudent.
#6: But I am creative, curious, wise, honest, funny, open-minded, persistent, loving, optimistic, I love to learn and appreciate beauty.
#7: In a nutshell, I am AWESOME.
#8: I just took the short one… working on the long questionaire. I’ll let you know what I find out about my strengths. I have a feeling they could be similar to yours.
March 12th, 2010 at 11:53 am
1. Love of learning
2. Appreciation of beauty and excellence
3. Curiosity and interest in the world
4. Judgment, critical thinking, and open-mindedness
5. Humor and playfullness
Yeah. That about sums it up.
Thanks for pointing the way to this. I love tests like these.
March 13th, 2010 at 9:35 pm
Social Intelligence… hmmm. I would say this has to do with (a) how to read people and (b) how to successfully communicate with people. IMO, successful communication involves hearing and understanding the POV of both sides, and building a bridge between differences of opinion. Not to force agreement, just to be able to visit each side.
Dear Prudence: won’t you come out and play?
Jess, I love how proudly you wear your awesomeness. That’s an inspiration. Your test results are bang on. You are a learner, an appreciator, an explorer.
I quite like how that site dates and tracks your results. You could take the same test every year, and see how different things affect.
I think my test was impacted by this crazy job-interview I had last week. I spent 20 minutes in a holding tank with other applicants, and that brought out the crazy-confident Joel. We like him.
May 30th, 2010 at 2:24 am
Hey, nice blog. Want to get money for blogging? I sure do. What a pipedream.
[Edited by Joel]
November 17th, 2010 at 3:22 am
I like these tests.. not so much the brief strength test, but definitely the long one.
My top five were:
1. Forgiveness and mercy
2. Honesty, authenticity and genuineness
3. Leadership
4. Capacity to love and be loved
5. Kindness and generosity