Learned Optimism: How to Change Your Mind and Your Life [Paperback]

That being said, I gave this book such a low rating because I feel that the title is completely misleading. I didn't want to read all sorts of information about WHY changing my mind and life is important and possible. I wanted to learn HOW, and that's what the title promises.

To be sure, there are some suggestions of how to learn optimism, but such little space in the book is dedicated to this topic that I felt misled and "ripped off" by the title.

It's like reading a book called "Instructions for Knitting a Sweater for your Baby" and discovering that only the last chapter is in fact instructive; the first 100 pages are about the history of knitting, the need for babies to wear sweaters, what happens to those poor babies who don't wear sweaters, and why the author considers himself to be the best darn knitter in the entire county. Enough already!

I did not find the book to be even readable (but I still read it).

Generally speaking the first part of the book, which is dedicated to the differences in explanatory styles is quite interesting. The section also contains a couple of self-test to measure your own level of optimism and your level of depression. I should say in passing that it is somewhat regrettable that the portion that shows readers how to change their explanatory styles is at the back of the book rather than immediately following the test results. I say that because chronic pessimist/depressive people like myself (I scored abysmally on both test) might be tempted to give up and kill themselves before they find out that the author actually tries to help them feel better. The portion at the back (learn how to be an optimism) constists of simple but undeniably effective tricks to change your way of thinking. All is consistent with "mood therapy" "cognitive psychology" types of similar works.

While there is no question that Seligman in on to something with his theory on optimism, he tries to use it to death by applying to just about everything including politics, society and history. Through history, there has been no shortage of philosophers who attempted to use one basic principle to explain society. Be it weather (Montesquieu), atoms (atomist Greek philosophy) or the evolution, it generally turn out to produce simplistic and poor scholarship. That kind of explanation also hides (although rather poorly) a deep sense of ethnocentrism.

If Seligman seriously think that one can explain voters' choices on the sole base of the optimistic/pessimistic profile of the candidates, I hope for him he is smoking good crack. What is more worrysome is his complete lack of understanding of basic concepts such as society, ideology and culture. For instance, one chapter is a comparison of East and West German media. Not only does it leave out important questions (such as how are the media produced and how closely do they reflect the readers' view)but what about ideology. Well of course, you'd expect a communist regime to give less weighting to individual agency in their explanation of events. Duh! At any rate the chapter explains nothing since his theories would have us expect that more optimistic group perform better which is not the case.

Personnally, I would have preferred a much shorter self-help book devoid of Seligman's naive positivist supertheories. It is a shame because in the end, his book could have raised good questions.
After reading the introduction on how explanatory styles influence people's lives I thought "How interesting? What is the relationship between learned helplessness and poverty? What is the role of ideology and social institutions in reproducing social inequalities through teaching people to be helpful or helpless, etc."
But instead, Seligman was more interesting in whoring himself out by helping a life insurance company determine which job applicants are best suited? Guess what? I could not care less.