Hall of Fame
Martin Seligman
Psychologist · University of Pennsylvania
Learned Optimism · Flourish · "Three Good Things" (2005 paper)
Martin Seligman is a research psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who, as president of the American Psychological Association in 1998, helped establish positive psychology as a recognized research field. The founding premise: psychology had spent most of its history studying pathology — what goes wrong in human beings. Positive psychology asks a different question: what allows human beings to function well, and what makes a life worth living?
Three Good Things
Among the specific practices that came out of Seligman's research, Three Good Things is the one most directly adjacent to the MyHGY Method. The practice is simple: each evening, write down three things that went well today, and for each, write a brief note about why it happened.
In Seligman's research, a one-week version of this practice produced measurable increases in wellbeing and decreases in depressive symptoms for participants. The longer-term findings were more nuanced: sustained benefit was associated with participants who continued the practice after the study ended — not with the one-week intervention itself.
The distinction matters. A single intervention introduces a pattern of attention; continuing the practice is what produces the cumulative shift. The proposed mechanism: repeated, deliberate attention toward what went well trains a habit that gradually changes the baseline from which a person experiences their days.
The PERMA model and wellbeing
Seligman's broader research produced a framework for wellbeing he called PERMA: Positive emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment. Each element contributes independently to a person's experience of a life going well — and each has its own levers.
The Accomplishment strand is particularly relevant here: the act of noting and preserving what you actually did, what you saw through, what you contributed. Seligman's research provides scientific context for why attending to accomplishment — rather than merely hoping for it — changes a person's sense of their own capability over time.
Learned optimism and explanatory style
Before positive psychology, Seligman's best-known work was on learned helplessness and its counterpart, learned optimism. His research demonstrated that the explanatory style through which a person interprets events has measurable effects on wellbeing, resilience, and performance.
People who explain setbacks as permanent, pervasive, and personal are more vulnerable to helplessness. People who explain them as temporary, specific, and situational are more resilient — and this style, crucially, can be learned.
How you close a day, and what you say to yourself about it, is a form of explanatory style. Treating a hard day as evidence of permanent incapacity is one choice. Treating it as a specific day with specific challenges — while also accounting for what was genuinely there — is another. The method provides structure for the second.
Intellectual lineage
How this connects to the MyHGY™ Method
Seligman's work provides the scientific adjacency — evidence from controlled research — for what the MyHGY Method asks you to do. Three Good Things and the method are not the same practice, but they draw from overlapping territory: deliberate, structured attention to what was good in a day as a practice that, done consistently, changes how a person functions over time.
The method is more specific than Three Good Things — it asks for evidence, not just notation; it has a defined sequence; it asks what you did, not just what went well. But the underlying logic about attention as a trainable function, and about the cumulative effect of that training on capability and wellbeing, runs through Seligman's body of research.
Martin Seligman is cited here solely for their published intellectual contributions. HaveAGreatYesterday.com and the MyHGY™ Method are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Martin Seligman. This recognition does not imply any relationship, collaboration, or endorsement.