Quotes from Donald O. Clifton

Positive psychology is a framework, or a paradigm, that encompasses an approach to psychology from the perspective of healthy, successful life functioning.

Well, more than likely you will never entirely dissolve either your fear of your own failure or your small pleasure in other people's.

We live with them every day, and they come so easily to us that they cease to be precious.

First, he became aware of it. Many of us don't seem able to take even this step. Second, and most significant, he chose not to focus on reinforcing its weaker threads. Instead, he did the exact opposite: He identified its strongest threads, wove in education and experience, and built them into the dominating strengths we see today.

The definition of a strength that we will use throughout this book is quite specific: consistent near perfect performance in an activity.

Third, you will excel only by maximizing your strengths, never by fixing your weaknesses. This is not the same as saying 'ignore your weaknesses.

To develop a strength in any activity requires certain natural talents.

Talents are your naturally recurring patterns of thought, feeling, or behavior.

Skills are so enticingly helpful that they obscure their two flaws. The first flaw is that while skills will help you perform, they will not help you excel.

The second flaw is that some activities, almost by definition, defy being broken down into steps.

Rather, your smartness and your effectiveness depend on how well you capitalize on your strongest connections.

If nature didn't whittle down your network to a smaller number of strongly forged connections, you would never become an adult. You would remain a permanent child, frozen in sensory overload.

Back in the 1930s, Carl Jung, the eminent thinker and psychologist, put it this way: Criticism has 'the power to do good when there is something that must be destroyed, dissolved or reduced, but [it is] capable only of harm when there is something to be built.

If your senses are numbed with delusion and denial, you will stop looking for these true strengths and wind up living a second-rate version of someone's life rather than a worldclass version of your own

At an early age, you started hearing it: It's a virtue to be "well-rounded."... They might as well have said : Become as dull as you possibly can be.

From this point of view, to avoid your strengths and to focus on your weaknesses isn't a sign of diligent humility. It is almost irresponsible. By contrast the most responsible, the most challenging, and, in the sense of being true to yourself, the most honorable thing to do is face up to the strength potential inherent in your talents and then find ways to realize it.

When we studied them, excellent performers were rarely well rounded. On the contrary, they were sharp.

But if you find yourself thinking in the future, if you find yourself actually anticipating the activity-'When can I do this again?'-it is a pretty good sign that you are enjoying it and that one of your talents is in play.

In Martin Seligman's words, 'Psychology is half-baked, literally half-baked. We have baked the part about mental illness. We have baked the part about repair and damage. But the other side is unbaked. The side of strengths, the side of what we are good at, the side…of what makes life worth living.

But not unlike the gremlins in the film of the same name who were transformed into nasty little critters if they were splashed or if they were fed after midnight, irrelevant nontalents can mutate into real weaknesses under one condition: As soon as you find yourself in a role that requires you to play to one of your nontalents-or area of low skills or knowledge-a weakness is born.

The only possible failure would be never managing to find the right role or the right partners to help you realize that strength.

The boundaries of human experience are finite (if you haven't experienced emotions such as pain or fear or shame, you are either a sociopath or an alien), but within these boundaries there is significant range and diversity.

The point here is not that you should always forgo this kind of weakness fixing. The point is that you should see it for what it is: damage control, not development. And as we mentioned earlier, damage control can prevent failure, but it will never elevate you to excellence.

While your spontaneous reactions provide the clearest trace of your talents, here are three more clues to keep in mind: yearnings, rapid learning, and satisfactions. Yearnings reveal the presence of a talent, particularly when they are felt early in life.