100 Ways To Motivate Yourself, Third Edition

69. Turn your mother down

Psychologist and author M. Scott Peck observes, “To a child, his or her parents represent the world. He assumes that the way his parents do things is the way things are done.” In Dr. Martin Seligman’s studies of optimism and pessimism, he found out the same thing: We learn how to explain the world to ourselves from our parents—and more specifically, our mothers.

“This tells us that young children listen to what their primary caretaker (usually the mother) says about causes,” writes Seligman, “and they tend to make this style their own. If the child has an optimistic mother, this is great, but it can be a disaster for the child if the child has a pessimistic mother.” Fortunately, Seligman’s studies show that the disaster ...