What does Met Life have to do with optimism? Quite a bit.

Met Life was one of the first organizations to work with Martin Seligman (our resident optimism guru) to apply his theories to the working world. And the company did so with great success.

Met Life (and all insurance companies, and many businesses for that matter) pay a lot of money to screen their candidates. Seligman believes that optimism is an important variable to look out for, and that this characteristic ties directly to the bottom line.

We'll begin with traditional hiring wisdom which “holds that there are two ingredients of success…the first is ability or aptitude, and IQ tests and SAT are supposed to measure it. The second is desire or motivation. No matter how much aptitude you have, says traditional wisdom, if you lack desire you will fail. Enough desire can make up for meager talent.”

Seligman continues, “I believe that traditional wisdom is incomplete. A composer can have all the talent of Mozart and a passionate desire to succeed, but if he believes he cannot compose music, he will come to nothing. He will not try hard enough. He will give up too soon when the elusive right melody takes too long to materialize.

Success requires persistence, the ability to not give up in the face of failure. I believe that optimistic explanatory style is the key to persistence.”

“The explanatory-style theory of success says that in order to choose people for success in a challenging job, you need to select for three characteristics:

1. aptitude

2. motivation

3. optimism”

Seligman took this theory to Met Life and tested it out. What’d he find?

In short, he found that insurance agents who scored in the less optimistic half of his test were twice as likely to quit as agents who scored in the more optimistic half. Further, The agents from the top quarter sold 50% more than the agents from the bottom quarter.

Powerful stuff.

Let’s get our explanatory style dialed-in, our Three P’s bumpin’, and rock it, shall we?

Sweet.