[MUSIC] So, I'm curious to hear you talk about the role of strengths in your own life? >> Character strengths is an issue that I am very interested in as well and I have some issues with the way they are presented. The character strength list, which is what, 24? >> 24. >> I think it is an important list, nobody has made a list like that and it is one of my favorite books the Peterson Seligman book, but there are two kinds of things in there. One of them are competences. Like wisdom, right? Things like that. And others are what I would call moral like compassion or trustworthiness. I think they're two very different kinds of things. So I think there's very good reason to play to your signature competence strengths. For example, if you're not good at music, why should you do it? If Michael Jordan is good at basketball, he should play basketball, he shouldn't compete in crossword puzzles. Basically, the way you succeed in our culture and in many cultures, is to be really good at something. So, I think it pays to play to your signature strengths. But, when we get to the moral domain- >> Can I just ask you? >> Yeah. >> Going back to the gratitude story you started out with, I believe it was Howard Gardner, you said, right? >> Now you've got me. >> Sorry. >> It's Howie, it's not Gardner, Howard Gardner is somebody else. >> Yeah. >> He's a positive psychologist actually. >> Right. >> No Howie Garland. Did I say Howie? >> I thought so but I could have just misheard. >> I meant Howie Garland. >> Howie Garland, so Howie Garland then, part of the reason why you're grateful for him if I understand you correctly is because he helped you to steer your life in the direction of your competency? >> Yes. Absolutely. So, if you don't swim well there's a lot of other things you can do in life. In sports you see people, incredibly specialized. Maybe it's unfortunate but in sports, top performance is what's critical and it doesn't matter if you're not a good jumper or if you're shooting arrows. >> My wife Susie and I just went to hear Simone Biles who was in town recently and she said she'd never tried another sport, gymnastics was it for her. >> And that's one reason she's, obviously there's other things, but, you have to give up your life to be an Olympic athlete. So it's interesting because my daughter is an actress, or was an actress, she's now a therapist. And her strength was versatility. So she can sing, she can dance, she can play any dialect, she's very good at a lot of different things. That isn't valued. She might be the third choice for a particular role. Now, the person who got that role would not even be able to compete for one of the other roles. But unless you had a repertory theater, which are sort of out now, where you had a bunch of people who did all the stuff, versatility is of no importance. You play a role, and you play it really well. So, sometimes, that's unfortunate because it gets people to be often a little too focused. And they'll see Mum Biles, for example, when she's 28 or whatever age it is that you can't do gymnastics. She has to start her life again. Now, she'll have a lot of good self behind her. Okay- >> So, what do you think it is in your own life that was the competency or the key competency that has allowed you to succeed in psychology? >> That's a good question. I have a couple of characteristics. I don't know if they'd call these signatures, I tend to be contrarian. I tend to not like what's going on now. Not because what's going on now is bad but because everybody is doing what's going on now. And so what I like to do is work where I can start with almost zero knowledge, and therefore anything I find out is pretty good, rather than doing the 50th study on the same thing. So I don't know how I got to be that way, it's not a great way to be. Because I can't get grants and I have trouble publishing because people say why are you studying that when we haven't figured out this? And so I just had a paper and food and music and the editor said, well relate this to psychology. Well food and music are a major part of psychology, so that's one thing. Another is I guess creativity is my strong point. I think of things in different ways than most people do. Sometimes those ways are silly, sometimes they're not. And to me, creativity involves two things. It involves coming up with something potentially interesting, and then being able to judge whether it's really interesting. So you could be good at one of those and not the other. And people who are just very creative, but have no judgement, need somebody next to them who says of those 12 ideas, this is the one that's good. So I think those are things and I like to teach a lot. And I learn a lot from teaching. I teach big classes, 600 students. I also teach little seminars. But I learn from teaching and I love it. And where I got that, I don't know. I didn't TA ever. As a graduate student. I had a National Science Foundation fellowship which, as it were, protected me from it. And then because some faculty member left while I was a grad student and there was no one to teach physiological psychology, which was my field, I taught the undergraduate physiological psych course at Harvard as a graduate student and I loved it. And the students were just great. One of the students, a couple of them became well-known people actually. And it was just exciting to me. So I don't know what that is. But going back to the issue of character strength, when you get to moral character strengths, I believe its a mistake to build on your strengths because I think as a person your character is judged by your weakness. So if you're a kind and dishonest person, people are going to focus on the dishonesty. There's a tendency for people to look at negative features which is I think built in. So a kind dishonest person is not a person in good character. And a person of pretty kind and pretty honest is probably better regarded, so I think what you should do in the moral domain is if you see that I'm not good at some moral character strength, say then how can improve that. Because this is the case when the chain is the strongest as it's weakest link, were as in the case of confidence the chain is the strongest as strongest link. >> That's fascinating Paul, I think you're right and it's a very important point. How would you say, so how would you respond to the advice about how to strengthen that weakest link? So some folks in positive psychology have argued that a good way to shore up your strengths, sorry. Some folks in positive psychology have argued that a good way to shore up your weaknesses is by using your strengths because you tend to enjoy that more. So if you're not a kind person, might you use the things that you are good at to help bolster your kindness? You think that's a promising approaching? >> Let me first confess that I really haven't thought a lot about how to boost your moral weaknesses as opposed to your competence weaknesses which in most cases is the best thing to do and the competence weakness is just to forget them, but it is important to boost your moral weakness and I really don't quite know how you make yourself more kind, or more trustworthy. This is a problem. You could use other moral strengths to say it's unkind to others to be untrustworthy. I mean you could try to link them in a way or you could try your more competence areas to do it. This is a problem I have not addressed and I think one reason may be that I'm not quite sure how you do it. >> Yeah, it's a challenge, isn't it? Maybe fairness, for example, you can think of fairness and kindness and try to link those in some ways. >> Yes. >> That if you were in that other person's shoes how might you feel in this situation and so? >> One possible way that I think is to take, get out of your head and see things from other people's point of view. Now the newspapers generally have taken that on. So whenever they start a story they don't tell you there's a lot of problems in Somalia. They tell you about a little kid or family that's in distress to try to get you to see it personally. And people are much more responsive to being, to individual events than they are to statistics. Joseph Stalin, not one of our heroes, once said that a single death is a tragedy and a million deaths is a statistic. And he was absolutely right and he was a person responsible for millions of deaths but you can concretize this. So my feeling is, for example, if we took the whole US Congress and took them to India for a week, not staying in the Hilton but just seeing how people are living there and all that, it would change their view not of the whole world, of humanity. So part of it is an awareness issue. And in so far as that is the case we can deal with both kind both kindness like just.
