Motivation and Personality

Abraham Maslow was a 20th century humanistic psychologist who came up with the hierarchy of needs and studied the most exceptional people of his era.

“What one can be, one must be!”

or

“What humans can be, they must be.”

You choose.

Full quote –

“Musicians must make music, artists must paint, poets must write if they are to be ultimately at peace with themselves. What human beings can be, they must be. They must be true to their own nature. This need we may call self-actualisation… It refers to man’s desire for self-fulfilment, namely to the tendency for him to become actually in what he is potentially: to become everything one is capable of becoming.”

Which ties in very closely with another Maslow quote –

“If you deliberately plan on being less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be unhappy for the rest of your life.”

We all have a “SelfImageOmeter” or “SelfEsteemOmeter”, picture it however you like in your mind.

We start every day with a clean slate.

-Ometer on 100.

Then we start making decisions and choices.

Roll over & go back to sleep. -1.

or

Smile, 5-4-3-2-1, Launch Your BFHA Outta Bed & get cracking with another Gift of a Day. +1.

You are either at 101 & starting to dominate the day and show yourself who is the Boss, or you are at 99 on your SelfImageOmeter, and you need to turn it round fast, otherwise you are on the slippery slope of compounding, to another shitty day that will end in in recrimination, distraction and uncomfortable numbness.

The simplest and quickest way to live a Good Life, keep +1ing, over & over.

“There are no perfect human beings! Persons can be found who are good, very good indeed, in fact, great. There do in fact exist creators, seers, sages, saints, shakers, and movers… even if they are uncommon and do not come by the dozen. And yet these very same people can at times be boring, irritating, petulant, selfish, angry, or depressed. To avoid disillusionment with human nature, we must first give up our illusions about it.”

Perfection does not exist in humankind. Nor does “Normal”. Stop trying to portray it to folks who aren’t looking, and don’t care anyway, cos they are too wrapped up in themselves.

I’m speshul & unique, you are speshul & unique, now let’s chat & have fun together.

Life could be vastly improved if we could count our blessings as self-actualising people can and do, and if we could retain their constant sense of good fortune and gratitude for it.”

Your brain (RAS, Amygdala, Thalamus…) filters reality to stop your head from exploding. You may as well choose to focus on your blessings rather than your curses, as in a stoic way, this is under your control, whereas externals are not.

Closely related to this is our sad ability to take things for granted, as opposed to “as granted”.

“Getting used to our blessings is one of the most important nonevil generators of human evil, tragedy and suffering.”

As a species we are evolutionarily designed to adapt.

Sadly we adapt to the good stuff all too easily, and take it for granted, rather than as granted.

“Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.”

We are all in this together.

Floating the same sea, on our sailboats of vary degrees of seaworthiness, making it up as best we can, as we go along.

Whereas the average individuals “often have not the slightest idea of what they are, of what they want, of what their own opinions are,” self-actualizing individuals have “superior awareness of their own impulses, desires, opinions, and subjective reactions in general.”

 We are all full of biases, delusions, narratives and firmly held beliefs.

But nobody knows us better than we know ourselves.

For we have been there, 24/7 for the entireity of our lives, watching.

As the Observer as well as the Player.

And we judge ourselves accordingly.

Consciously or subconsciously.

If you need a nudge to start the inner conversation, try meditating or journaling the following –

• If you were absolutely guaranteed to succeed, what would you dare to do?
• What are you most passionate about?
• What are your greatest strengths?
• How can you get paid doing what you love?
• When do you feel most alive? What circumstances? Around what people?
• What were your 5 greatest accomplishments over the last 5 years?
• Your 5 greatest accomplishments over the next 5 years? The next 25 years?
• How can you best share your gifts with the world?
• What would you do if you weren’t afraid?
• What other questions should you be asking yourself?!?

For the curious, my answers as of 21/8/26 at 11:55 are linked here.

“It seems that the necessary thing to do is not to fear mistakes, to plunge in, to do the best that one can, hoping to learn enough from blunders to correct them eventually.”

Personally, I prefer “…correct them swiftly & permanently”. That is what makes mistakes worthwhile, learning from the buggers. And never repeating them.

I fear we are programmed from a young age to fear making mistakes and looking stoopid.

“Aren’t you a clever boy/girl/tree!” is a bloody dangerous bit of praise, cos it makes you wanna play safe to get more, not risk falling into failure.

“Man who never made a mistake, never made anything”, often misattributed to Albert Einstein, but that should be the enculturation from an early age.

We are formed early on, “Give me the boy till he is 5/7, and I’ll show you the man” as Aristotle or the Jesuits coined, is very true. And it is hard to break that programming, even when we are aware it is detrimental to us.

Again, for the curious, here are the 19 Characteristics of the Self-Actualiser –

1. Perception of Reality: These individuals tend to have a “superior relationship with reality” and are “generally unthreatened and unfrightened by the unknown.” In fact, “They accept it, are comfortable with it, and, often are even more attracted by it than by the known. They not only tolerate the ambiguous and unstructured—they like it.”
2. Acceptance: “Even the normal member of our culture feels unnecessarily guilty or ashamed about too many things and has anxiety in too many situations. Our healthy individuals find it possible to accept themselves and their own nature without chagrin or complaint or, for that matter, without even thinking about the matter that much.”
3. Spontaneity: The behavior of the self-actualizing individual is “marked by simplicity and naturalness, and by lack of artificiality or straining for effect.”
4. Problem Centering: Self-actualizers customarily have some “mission in life.”
5. Solitude: Self-actualizing individuals “positively like solitude and privacy to a definitely greater degree than the average person.”
6. Autonomy: “They have become strong enough to be independent of the good opinion of other people, or even of their affection. The honors, the status, the rewards, the popularity, the prestige, and the love they can bestow must have become less important than self-development and inner growth.”
7. Fresh Appreciation: “Self-actualizing people have the wonderful capacity to appreciate again and again, freshly and naively, the basic goods of life, with awe, pleasure, wonder and even ecstasy, however stale these experiences may have become to others.”
8. Peak Experiences: It’s been called “flow” or “being in the zone.” Whatever you want to call it, self-actualizers tend to experience it more often than average.
9. Human Kinship: “Self-actualizing people have a deep feeling of identification, sympathy, and affection for human beings in general. They feel kinship and connection, as if all people were members of a single family.” … “Self-actualizing individuals have a genuine desire to help the human race.”
10. Humility and Respect: All of Maslow’s subjects “may be said to be democratic people in the deepest sense… they can be friendly with anyone of suitable character, regardless of class, education, political belief, race or color. As a matter of fact it often seems as if they are not aware of these differences, which are for the average person so obvious and so important.”
11. Interpersonal Relationships: “Self-actualizing people have these especially deep ties with rather few individuals. Their circle of friends is rather small. The ones that they love profoundly are few in number.”
12. Ethics: “They do right and do not do wrong. Needless to say, their notions of right and wrong and of good and evil are often not the conventional ones.”
13. Means and Ends: “They are fixed on ends rather than on means, and means are quite definitely subordinated to these ends.”
14. Humor: “They do not consider funny what the average person considers to be funny. Thus they do not laugh at hostile humor (making people laugh by hurting someone) or superiority humor (laughing at someone else’s inferiority) or authority-rebellion humor (the unfunny, Oedipal, or smutty joke).”
15. Creativity: “This is a universal characteristic of all the people studied or observed. There is no exception.”
16. Resistance to Enculturation: “Of all of them it may be said that in a certain profound and meaningful sense they resist enculturation and maintain a certain inner detachment from the culture in which they are immersed.”
17. Imperfections: Actualizers “show many of the lesser human failings. They too are equipped with silly, wasteful, or thoughtless habits. They can be boring, stubborn, irritating. They are by no means free from a rather superficial vanity, pride, partiality to their own productions, family, friends, and children. Temper outbursts are not rare.”
18. Values: “A firm foundation for a value system is automatically furnished to self-actualizers by their philosophic acceptance of the nature of self, of human nature, of much of social life, and of nature and physical reality.”
19. Resolution of Dichotomies: “The dichotomy between selfishness and unselfishness disappears altogether in healthy people because in principle every act is both selfish and unselfish.”