Monday Motivation: 5.8.23
"You can visit pity city, just don't live there."
- Jeanie Daniel Duck (see editor's note for more context)
In positive psychology, there's a concept called Learned Optimism coined by Martin E. P. Seligman. In his book of the same name, he argues that optimism is not just a personality trait but a skill that can be cultivated and developed.
Pessimism, or Pity City, is not a place where you want to live. It's a thought distortion that makes people feel helpless in the face of change, the opposite of learned optimism.
Pity City is characterized by the 3 Ps:
- Personalization: taking things personally, without considering alternatives (e.g. blaming yourself first without consideration of external factors)
- Pervasiveness: the belief that a negative event or experience in one area of your life will affect or "spill over" into other unrelated areas of your life.
- Permanence: the idea that what is happening in the moment will last forever.
These are the ways of thinking that need to be overcome to take a on more positive approach to life.
Get out of Pity City today if you found that you've overstayed your welcome.
Editor's note: Attribution to this quote is quite tricky.
The earliest reference I could find on the internet to Pity City was through Jeanie Daniel Duck's 1993 Harvard Business Review (HBR) article "Managing Change: The Art of Balancing".
There was also the leadership trainer Jim Clemmer who gave a Leadership Training and Change Management talk in 2007 that referenced pity city.
Most recently, the CEO of MillerKnoll, Andi Owen, caught heat for a "pep talk" she gave employees in light of a question around missed bonuses in April of 2023. She referenced the direct quote which was said to her by a previous mentor. It didn't go over well with the employees or the internet.
For our purposes, I'll go with Jeanie Daniel Duck for the quote attribution but if you have better information, let me know!