So much to think about. I will only comment on two details:
Seligman believes everyone has certain strengths already (“signature strengths”), and you should concentrate on using those strengths as much as possible rather than on trying to improve your weaknesses:
“I do not believe that you should devote overly much effort to correcting your weaknesses. Rather, I believe that the highest success in living and the deepest emotional satisfaction comes from building and using your signature strengths.”
(For the record, I disagree.)
Seems to me that some traits are “optional”, like playing a piano. If you have a weakness in an optional area, just ignore it. The time and energy to get from “zero” to “mediocre” is better spent somewhere else.
Some traits are “necessary”, like healthy living, or communicating with people. A big weakness here is almost certainly going to hurt you. You should spend time and energy to get from “zero” to “mediocre”, but maybe you can then stop there, because of the diminishing returns.
This was the perspective of weakness. From the perspective of strength, it depends on whether your skills are “alternatives” or “synergies”. For alternatives, focus on the strongest. If you could be a great software developer or a great piano player, choose one, because you get better paid for having one “great” skill than two “nice” skills that you can’t use simultaneously. For synergies—if you are a math teacher, you could work on your math skills or on your teaching skills—do whatever gives you better marginal total improvement, probably both of them in long term.
(It is debatable what exactly is an alternative and what is synergy. Perhaps you could become a YouTube celebrity by playing piano music about software development. But if you are not using your skills as synergy, for all practical purposes they are not.)
Important note: strengths are not opposites of weaknesses. For example, being physically too weak is bad and you should fix it, but being too bad at playing piano is a thing you can safely ignore. On the other end of the scale, being a bodybuilder and being a great piano player are two alternatives, neither of them inherently better than the other one.
As a toy math model, imagine that your traits are numbers from −100 to +100, and each trait at value x gives you x^3 utility points. If you get an opportunity to give +1 to one of your traits, obviously you choose the largest negative one over smaller negative ones, and the largest positive one over smaller positive ones. If this happens repeatedly with the negative numbers, you will keep improving the worst ones, putting them into greater balance. If this happens repeatedly with the positive numbers, you will keep improving the best one, making greater imbalance. In this model, skills like “communication” have a range between −100 and +100, but skills like piano playing have a range between 0 and +100.
But you also need to consider not just your hypothetical optimal character build, but also what is psychologically sustainable. Maybe spending 24 hours a day fixing your mistakes sounds good, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended quite bad, simply because you would spend all your time focusing on how bad you are. You should spend enough time developing your existing strengths, just to remind yourself that you have them.
...oops, this got much longer than I originally intended...
Also, freely expressing our emotions (so as to avoid the damage of Freudian “repression”) rather than trying to exert control over them is overrated and perhaps counterproductive.
If “freely expressing emotions” means something like “whenever you get angry, start screaming”, I believe that in psychoanalysis this is used as an intermediate stage, like an improvement over “sitting silently and cutting your arms”, or as a debugging tool during the session, not as a desirable way of life.
So much to think about. I will only comment on two details:
Seems to me that some traits are “optional”, like playing a piano. If you have a weakness in an optional area, just ignore it. The time and energy to get from “zero” to “mediocre” is better spent somewhere else.
Some traits are “necessary”, like healthy living, or communicating with people. A big weakness here is almost certainly going to hurt you. You should spend time and energy to get from “zero” to “mediocre”, but maybe you can then stop there, because of the diminishing returns.
This was the perspective of weakness. From the perspective of strength, it depends on whether your skills are “alternatives” or “synergies”. For alternatives, focus on the strongest. If you could be a great software developer or a great piano player, choose one, because you get better paid for having one “great” skill than two “nice” skills that you can’t use simultaneously. For synergies—if you are a math teacher, you could work on your math skills or on your teaching skills—do whatever gives you better marginal total improvement, probably both of them in long term.
(It is debatable what exactly is an alternative and what is synergy. Perhaps you could become a YouTube celebrity by playing piano music about software development. But if you are not using your skills as synergy, for all practical purposes they are not.)
Important note: strengths are not opposites of weaknesses. For example, being physically too weak is bad and you should fix it, but being too bad at playing piano is a thing you can safely ignore. On the other end of the scale, being a bodybuilder and being a great piano player are two alternatives, neither of them inherently better than the other one.
As a toy math model, imagine that your traits are numbers from −100 to +100, and each trait at value x gives you x^3 utility points. If you get an opportunity to give +1 to one of your traits, obviously you choose the largest negative one over smaller negative ones, and the largest positive one over smaller positive ones. If this happens repeatedly with the negative numbers, you will keep improving the worst ones, putting them into greater balance. If this happens repeatedly with the positive numbers, you will keep improving the best one, making greater imbalance. In this model, skills like “communication” have a range between −100 and +100, but skills like piano playing have a range between 0 and +100.
But you also need to consider not just your hypothetical optimal character build, but also what is psychologically sustainable. Maybe spending 24 hours a day fixing your mistakes sounds good, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it ended quite bad, simply because you would spend all your time focusing on how bad you are. You should spend enough time developing your existing strengths, just to remind yourself that you have them.
...oops, this got much longer than I originally intended...
If “freely expressing emotions” means something like “whenever you get angry, start screaming”, I believe that in psychoanalysis this is used as an intermediate stage, like an improvement over “sitting silently and cutting your arms”, or as a debugging tool during the session, not as a desirable way of life.