Can't this be taken to unhealthy extremes? Sounds exactly like how narcissists think.
Just look at Trump. He claims personal responsibility for his successes, but his failures are always one-time events that were other people's fault.
Where should one draw the line?
> Narcissistic personality disorder (NPD) is a long-term pattern of abnormal
> behavior characterized by exaggerated feelings of self-importance, an
> excessive need for admiration, and a lack of understanding of others' feelings.
I think you can be optimistic without having an exaggerated feeling of self-importance, and certainly it has nothing to do with a need for admiration or lacking understanding for the feelings of others.
So... I think the answer as to where to draw the line is, "If you are aware enough to worry about the line, you don't need the line."
However the flip side of this is that it essentially trains people to disclaim any personal responsibility for bad events, and this has been mentioned in investigations into atrocities committed by the US military. Unfortunately the only citations I can find with a quick Google search are from pretty shady or biased sources, but I do remember seeing some more reliable-looking ones in the past.
It's also a common claim that CEOs tend to exhibit sociopathic tendencies, and it's not hard to see how this might apply there. I read Seligman's book several years ago (and like Reginald, I recommend that almost everyone reads it - it's fascinating) but when I took the test I only came out as mostly optimistic. On 4 of the 6 axes I was considered optimistic, but the other two could be colloquially translated as "when I do bad things I think it's my fault". Now according to Seligman, if I didn't think like that I'd be way better off, but I think I'm ok with maintaining the psychological equivalent of a moral compass there.
Seligman did some work with optimism and the forces, but the Learned Helplessness stuff was taken by two people unconnected with Seligman (James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen) who turned it into a manual for torturing people.
Seligman's name was dragged through the mud for this, but he didn't do the work on torture, and his research was into identifying the causes of Learned Helplessness precisely so people could avoid it. He openly discusses helping the forces apply his research to aiding captured soldiers resist torture:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/04/21/learned-helplessn...
There is a lot of he-said/he-said at work, but there is no evidence that he worked with the CIA or anybody else on implementing torture.
Of course, you may be discussing something else entirely!
Sure it can. Happiness is orthogonal to ethicality or mental health. The line is not a line but rather a homeostatic balance subject to your own priorities and your culture's definition of those concepts.
Engage in self reflection and be honest with yourself, something I doubt Trump does.