The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.

What determines how much time and deliberate practice a child is willing to devote to achievement? Nothing less than her character.

Optimism is invaluable for the meaningful life. With a firm belief in a positive future, you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are.

So Positive Psychology takes seriously the bright hope that if you find yourself stuck in the parking lot of life, with few and only ephemeral pleasures, with minimal gratifications, and without meaning, there is a road out. This road takes you through the countryside of pleasure and gratification, up into the high country of strength and virtue, and finally to the peaks of lasting fulfillment: meaning and purpose

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

Psychology is much bigger than just medicine, or fixing unhealthy things. Its about education, work, marriage - its even about sports. What I want to do is see psychologists working to help people build strengths in all these domains.

If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.