The good life consists in deriving happiness by using your signature strengths every day in the main realms of living. The meaningful life adds one more component: using these same strengths to forward knowledge, power or goodness.

In a society in which individualism is becoming rampant, people more and more believe that they are the center of the world. Such a belief system makes individual failure almost inconsolable.

The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.

The defining characteristic of pessimists is that they tend to believe that bad events will last a long time, will undermine everything they do, and are their own fault. The optimists, who are confronted with the same hard knocks of this world, think about misfortune in the opposite way. They tend to believe that defeat is just a temporary setback or a challenge, that its causes are just confined to this one case.

Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.

Doing a kindness produces the single most reliable momentary increase in well-being of any exercise we have tested.

When we take time to notice the things that go right - it means we're getting a lot of little rewards throughout the day.

When well-being comes from engaging our strengths and virtues, our lives are imbued with authenticity.

You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.

We deprive our children, our charges, of persistence. What I am trying to say is that we need to fail, children need to fail, we need to feel sad, anxious and anguished. If we impulsively protect ourselves and our children, as the feel-good movement suggests, we deprive them of learning-persistence skills.