The secret to true happiness

Amit's Thoughts: The secret to true happiness

Seligman tells of an academic colleague who kept an Amazonian lizard as a pet in his lab. It would eat nothing he could think of to feed it - not lettuce, mango, minced meat, swatted flies. It was starving before his eyes.

One day he offered it a ham sandwich. No interest. He began reading the paper, finished the first section and allowed it to drop to the floor on top of the sandwich.

"The lizard took one look at this configuration, crept stealthily across the floor, leapt onto the newspaper, shredded it, and then gobbled up the ham sandwich," Seligman writes. It needed to stalk and shred before it would eat. And we turn out to be a bit like that.