Study note | Is happiness a stochastic phenomenon?

Continuing to sharing my study of Harvard Positive Psychology. In today's lesson, Professor Tal first emphasised and elaborate three main reasons to learn Positive Psychology. In my words, I summarised as follows:

1. Balancing the tilt pendulum
   As I mentioned in yesterday's study note, there are too many researches focus on psychosis instead of positive psychology. Choosing to study positive psychology is trying to balance this phenomenon.

2. Getting rid of depression won't make happiness
   We always have the false view that the opposite of depression is happiness. However, in this case, getting rid of depression doesn't equal to gaining happiness. On the contrary, the way to obtaining happiness is to focus on things that make us happy and bring us the enjoyment. We should turn on 'Health mode' which focus on health rather than 'Disease mode'.

3. Positive Psychology can in return mitigate negative energy
   According to Professor Tal, "We should systematically building competence, not correcting weakness." Given our effort on more positive things, we could actually cultivate our personal growth and thrive on.

Then Professor Tal introduces five premises of positive psychology and elaborated it in this and following weeks' lessons. There are two premises covered in this lesson: bridge building and believing in change.

As he emphasised in the first lesson, "All his classes would be continuous reminding instead of teaching new things." I do understanding what that means, because all the things he mentioned are very common but easily neglected. By saying "bridge building", he means we should realise our idealism into reality. We should be more practical and take actions to make our idealism and good intention come true. Regarding for "believing change is possible", Professor Tal means our happiness level is not determined by our genes and we can actually change the levels by using the right method. And further, he mentioned that the right way is study the best, learn from the best and apply to our 'average' life.

To be honest, I didn't feel any discomfort when he said that opinion in the first place. Some may call this elitism. However, if we don't study the best how can we know the ultimate goal we can reach and how far we can go? Learning from the best is always the most practical and effective way to improve our skills in any way. There is an old saying in China is that “取法乎上，仅得其中；取法乎中，仅得其下”，means setting higher goals we can get better results even though it is not the best results as we expected. Learning from the best is the same thing. We can all benefit from the techniques we learn from them and improve our skills no matter we can grow up to be one of the Master or not. From this point of view, happiness is not a stochastic phenomenon, we can chase after them by using certain methods.

Sentence of the day

Learn from the best to know our potential.