Rather, I've always heard that it's best to think in terms of circumstances and not blame, for both yourself and others. There's a subtle difference between them. You've phrased it as "blame others, not yourself", but both of those alternatives are equally unhealthy.
Rather, you should figure out a variety of possible explanations for your low performance, and then ascribe meaning to the ones you can change and forget about the ones you can't. "I failed the test because I'm stupid" is a completely useless conclusion. So is "the teacher was in a bad mood". "I didn't study", however, is a very useful conclusion, because it suggests what you should do next time: study harder. So is "I don't actually like physics", because it also suggests a course of action: switch your major.
The overall point is to get out of the habit of learned helplessness and take responsibility for your own life. Blaming others doesn't accomplish that, because you've still attributed outcomes to things you can't control.
I read Seligman's book about optimism as well. He studied insurance salespeople for a time, which I think influences a lot of the advice. The best salespeople had a modicum of self-preserving delusion. Not enough to ignore correctable problems with their own performance, but enough to endure all the rejections one gets as a salesperson.
This advice is clearly more applicable to sales than to, say, spacecraft design. But maybe more things are like sales than we think.
Seligman's book is challenging to a hacker personality because he is saying that there's some information which it's best not to ruminate about. Many hackers are naturally inclined to perfectionism: analyze failures, perfect the technique before daring to try again. But a lot of success in life might just be about sheer persistence; trying again without dwelling on failures too much.
So, for a lot of the social professions, success is realizing that other people have minds of their own who may or may not agree with you, and that if they don't, that doesn't necessarily reflect on you or mean you're doing anything wrong. So if you blow an interview, it doesn't necessarily mean that you're stupid, it could just be that you drew a bad question or a bad interviewer or just weren't what the company was looking for.
I've been struggling with this for a while in the context of dating, which is another area where you'll face lots of rejection that usually isn't your fault. I think that's a lot healthier than to phrase it as "blame others" - you should respect others, but realize that what they want is not necessarily what you want. Heck, put that in a dating context and you can immediately see the problem: somebody who blames the girl when they're rejected is a creep, not a success.
> I think that's a lot healthier than to phrase it as "blame others" - you should respect others, but realize that what they want is not necessarily what you want.
The seduction community (/r/seduction to be specific) calls this outcome independence. A great deal of emphasis there is put on overcoming rejection.
Rather, I've always heard that it's best to think in terms of circumstances and not blame, for both yourself and others. There's a subtle difference between them. You've phrased it as "blame others, not yourself", but both of those alternatives are equally unhealthy.
Rather, you should figure out a variety of possible explanations for your low performance, and then ascribe meaning to the ones you can change and forget about the ones you can't. "I failed the test because I'm stupid" is a completely useless conclusion. So is "the teacher was in a bad mood". "I didn't study", however, is a very useful conclusion, because it suggests what you should do next time: study harder. So is "I don't actually like physics", because it also suggests a course of action: switch your major.
The overall point is to get out of the habit of learned helplessness and take responsibility for your own life. Blaming others doesn't accomplish that, because you've still attributed outcomes to things you can't control.