Arthur Brooks

And over time, sure enough, after about a year, which was slower than some people and faster than others, I could go out of the house without rehearsing what I was going to say.

And now, you know, years and years and decades and decades later, I can lecture in Spanish and I can live in Spain.

And the other day I did live TV in Spanish.

It's my second language.

I'm almost as comfortable as I am in English.

I still have an accent, by the way.

But you get the idea.

Self-enhancement says that that whole idea, you won't make progress if you pretend you can already speak fluently, and you also won't make progress if you make your lack of fluency your identity.

You get my point.

Work to improve, step three.

Step four, don't blame other people for your flaw.

Now, again, sometimes other people are to blame for stuff, but it still doesn't help.

It still doesn't help.

There's a very interesting body of literature that shows that people who take responsibility for things that aren't even their responsibility, they tend to do better in life.

And you can kind of figure out why that's the case.

They're sort of life entrepreneurs, right?

They find solutions to things.

But if you're wallowing in the idea that everything is somebody else's fault,

you're very unlikely to be finding productive solutions to the problems in your life and you're going to get less happy.

Marty Seligman, Martin Seligman, here's the Pennsylvania, my great mentor.