altruistic, creative, open, authentic, accepting, independent, and brave.

Remember, it took one child in the fairy tale to say, “The Emperor has no clothes!” and then everyone saw it.

a friend as someone who is truly “need-gratifying” and whose needs you want to gratify in return. He then defined the friendship of lovers as one where each other’s needs melt into one, as the partner’s needs become your needs.

The need for safety is tied to a particular form of meaning in life. Psychologists have identified three different forms of meaning: coherence, purpose, and mattering.5 Purpose involves a motivation to realize future-oriented and valued life goals. Mattering consists of the extent to which people feel that their existence and actions in the world

it. Dopamine is a huge energizing force in our lives, driving our motivation to explore and facilitating the cognitive and behavioral processes that allow us to extract the most delights from the unknown.10

Rogers conceptualized openness to experience as a mode of cognitive processing where one is open to all of one’s personal experiences, receiving conflicting information without forcing closure, tolerating ambiguity, and seeing reality clearly without imposing predetermined categories onto the world.60 In the eighties, when personality psychologists

There was no further reason why they devoted so much time to their work; the values were not in service of anything else, nor were they instrumental in achieving any other goal. When Maslow asked, “But why do you care about justice so much?” respondents would say something along the lines of “I just do.” Maslow believed that satisfaction of the

PRINCIPLE #3: BECOME AWARE OF YOUR INNER CONFLICTS To have conflicts is human. Conflicts with others, conflicts with ourselves. While there is a universal set of basic needs, we each have dramatically different ways of satisfying those needs. We also differ as to which needs we consider most important and when in our lives they are most prominent.

Goals that are conducive to growth—mastery, self-improvement, creativity, connection, contribution to society—are likely to lead to greater well-being than goals concerned with status and driven by insecurity—attaining power, money, self-esteem, appearance, or popularity. Of course, since we have many needs, we also have multiple strivings in life.