The Most Optimistic Insurance Salesmen Sold More and Stayed Far Longer
MetLife hired 140 super optimists to test a psychologist's theory, and three quarters were still selling after four years when 90 percent of their peers had quit.
Hidden Brain · How to Make a Difference: Part 1The phone rang just as Martin Seligman, a psychologist studying optimism, walked in from a day spent looking at data on Olympic swimmers.
On the line was an insurance salesman. Seligman hung up on him.
Then he stopped. Being hung up on all day had to make selling life insurance an awfully difficult job. A month earlier, he had become friendly with the chief executive of Metropolitan Life at a professional meeting, and described his research on optimism. The executive had told him to call if he ever received an application for life insurance.
So Seligman called and asked how the company hired salespeople. It hired 5,000 new salespeople a year. After one year, 50 percent dropped out. After four years, 90 percent had quit. The chief executive said, "They just can't take the rejection."
Seligman said he had an assessment that could forecast who could stick with it. The test asks how people explain good and bad events, whether they see setbacks as temporary or permanent, specific to one situation or sweeping across their lives, and their own fault or not. It had already predicted college grades and success among Olympic swimmers.
Metropolitan Life started giving the test to salespeople. Even the salespeople who scored as pessimists were more optimistic than ordinary people. As Seligman put it, "you have to be Frankensteinianly optimistic to even start" selling insurance.
Then the company hired 140 people who scored at the very top of the optimism scale. That group outsold everyone else at MetLife. Four years later, 75 percent of that group were still working, compared with 10 percent of salespeople overall.
Questions people ask
Why would optimism matter so much in insurance sales?
Rejection feels personal and lasting to a pessimist, so repeated calls that end in hang-ups can feel like proof that effort does not matter. An optimist is more likely to treat each no as temporary and specific to that call, and so keeps dialing.
Did the same pattern show up anywhere besides insurance?
Yes. Seligman found the same pattern at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, where explanatory style measured on the first day predicted who quit during the brutal first summer, and in college grades, where optimists outperformed their talent.
Can a pessimist learn to think more optimistically?
Training can help. Seligman later developed exercises that teach people to challenge permanent and sweeping explanations for setbacks, and to practice more temporary and specific ones. Studies have linked that training to lower depression and better performance at school and work.