You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.

Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence.

Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.

Once a depressed person becomes active and hopeful, self-esteem always improves. Bolstering self-esteem without changing hopelessness, without changing passivity, accomplishes nothing.

One of the things psychologists used to say was that if you are depressed, anxious or angry, you couldn't be happy. Those were at opposite ends of a continuum. I believe that you can be suffering or have a mental illness and be happy - just not in the same moment that you're sad.

When it comes to our health, there are essentially four things under our control: the decision not to smoke, a commitment to exercise, the quality of our diet, and our level of optimism. And optimism is at least as beneficial as the others.

You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.