What It Takes to Make Progress When the Future Feels Out of Control
Martin Seligman argues agency is made of three separable components — efficacy (belief you can hit a goal now), optimism (belief effort pays off long-term) and imagination (the breadth of goals you can envision) — and that all three respond to training rather than being fixed traits. He positions abductive reasoning, the creative inferential leap, as the human capability AI does not replicate.
When you catch yourself concluding a project or a market is hopeless, put it in perspective — worst case, best case, most likely case — then plan against the most likely one. Treating pessimism as a testable hypothesis rather than a read on reality is the habit that separates people who keep making moves from people who wait.
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