To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

helplessness.” First with studies on dogs, and later with research on humans, Seligman pushed back against the prevailing behavioralist view, which held that all creatures, whether they walked on two legs or four, responded systematically and predictably to external rewards and punishments. Seligman’s work demonstrated that after extended experiences in which they were stripped of any control over their environment, some individuals just gave up. Even when conditions returned to normal, and they once again possessed the ability to seek gain or avoid pain, they didn’t act. They had learned to be helpless.
    In human beings, Seligman observed, learned helplessness was usually a function of people’s “explanatory style”—their habit of explaining negative events to themselves. Think of explanatory style as a form of self-talk that occurs after (rather than before) an experience. People who give up easily, who become helpless even in situations where they actually can do something, explain bad events as permanent , pervasive , and personal . They believe that negative conditions will endure a long time, that the causes are universal rather than specific to the circumstances, and that they’re the ones to blame. So if their boss yells at them, they interpret it as “My boss is always mean” or “All bosses are jerks” or “I’m incompetent at my job” rather than “My boss is having an awful day and I just happened to be in the line of fire when he lost it.” A pessimistic explanatory style—the habit of believing that “it’s my fault, it’s going to last forever, and it’s going to undermine everything I do” 16 —is debilitating, Seligman found. It can diminish performance, trigger depression, and “turn setbacks into disasters.” 17
    By the mid-1980s, after learned helplessness had become a staple of introductory psychology courses, Seligman and some colleagues began wondering whether the theory had a sunnier flip side. If people with a downbeat explanatory style suffered, do people with an upbeat style thrive? To find out, Seligman and his University of Pennsylvania colleague Peter Schulman sought a territory awash in disappointment, one whose inhabitants every day faced wave after wave of negative reactions: sales.
    The two researchers assembled nearly one hundred sales agents from the Pennsylvania region of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. These men (and a few women) held classic sales jobs. They made cold calls to set up appointments, met with prospects to pitch policies, and earned their living from commissions on the sales they closed. Seligman and Schulman gave all the agents the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ), a psychological assessment that offers a series of vignettes, the responses to which locate the person’s explanatory style on a pessimism-optimism spectrum. Then they tracked the agents’ performance over the next two years, measuring how much insurance they sold and the total commissions they earned.
    The results were unequivocal. “Agents who scored in the optimistic half of explanatory style sold 37% more insurance than agents scoring in the pessimistic half. Agents in the top decile sold 88% more insurance than those in the bottom decile,” they discovered. 18
    Next, in response to Metropolitan Life’s concern that about half of its sales agents quit their jobs in the first year, Seligman and Schulman studied a different group—more than one hundred newly hired salespeople. Before these agents started their jobs, the researchers gave them the ASQ. Then they charted their progress. Agents who scored in the pessimistic half of the ASQ ended up quitting at twice the rate of those in the optimistic half. Agents in the most pessimistic quarter were three times as likely to quit as those in the most optimistic 25 percent. 19
    In other words, the salespeople with an optimistic explanatory style—who saw rejections as temporary rather than permanent, specific