Daniel Goleman

Just imagine you're four years old, and someone makes the following proposal: If you'll wait until after he runs an errand, you can have two marshmallows for a treat. If you can't wait until then, you can have only one--but you can have it right now. It is a challenge sure to try the soul of any four-year-old, a microcosm of the eternal battle between impulse and restraint, id and ego, desire and self-control, gratification and delay... There is perhaps no psychological skill more fundamental than resisting impulse. It is the root of all emotional self-control, since all emotions, by their very nature, led to one or another impulse to act.

'At last, psychology gets serious about glee, fun, and happiness. Martin Seligman has given us a gift—a practical map for the perennial quest for a flourishing life.' ~ Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence commenting on Authentic Happiness

For better or worse, intelligence can come to nothing when the emotions hold sway.

We too often confront postmodern dilemmas with an emotional repertoire tailored to the urgencies of the Pleistocene.

There was an emotional brain long before there was a rational one.

Emotional aptitude is a meta-ability, determining how well we can use whatever other skills we have, including raw intellect.

Students who are anxious, angry, or depressed don’t learn; people who are caught in these states do not take in information efficiently or deal with it well.

Hope was a better predictor of their first-semester grades than were their scores on the SAT.

Attention works much like a muscle—use it poorly and it can wither; work it well and it grows. We’ll see how smart practice can further develop and refine the muscle of our attention, even rehab focus-starved brains.

Emotional resilience comes down to how quickly we recover from upsets. People who are highly resilient—who bounce back right away—can have as much as thirty times more activation in the left prefrontal area than those who are less resilient. The good news: we can increase the strength of the amygdala-calming left prefrontal circuitry.

All of this was foreseen way back in 1977 by the Nobel-winning economist Herbert Simon. Writing about the coming information-rich world, he warned that what information consumes is ‘the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.’

Another bottom line: Anything we can do to increase children’s capacity for cognitive control will help them throughout life.

And positivity, in turn, has great payoffs for performance, energizing us so we can focus better, think more flexibly, and persevere. Here’s a question: If everything worked out perfectly in your life, what would you be doing in ten years? That query invites us to dream a little, to consider what really matters to us and how we might guide our lives.

Directing attention toward where it needs to go is a primal task of leadership. Talent here lies in the ability to shift attention to the right place at the right time, sensing trends and emerging realities and seizing opportunities.

The more you care about someone, the more attention you pay—and the more attention you pay, the more you care. Attention interweaves with love.

The power to disengage our attention from one thing and move it to another is essential for well-being.