10 Qualities For Self-Actualization in the 21st Century
For centuries philosophers and psychologists have pondered the question — what makes a meaningful life?
Abraham Maslow tried to answer this question by his now famous hierarchy of needs pyramid.
Most of us should have a memory of this multi-colored pyramid from school. At the base, our physiological needs include food, water, warmth and rest.
Moving up the ladder, Maslow mentions safety, love, and self-esteem and accomplishment.
But after all those have been satisfied, the top of the pyramid is: Self-Actualization.
Self-Actualization is the desire to become the most that one can be. To become the best version of oneself.
It involves striving to achieve our full potential and satisfy our creative goals.
Most of us at least have an idea on how to fulfill our base needs. But self-actualization is tricky. It’s definition is vague and there is no set strategy to get there.
What does it mean to achieve full potential? How do we even begin to navigate this terrain?
Scott Barry Kaufman, a psychologist at Columbia University, used modern statistical methods to deepen our understanding of the characteristics of the highest level of the pyramid in a recently published paper in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology.
He identified 10 characteristics that predicts self-actualized personality with the highest reliability.
The most reliable characteristic of self-actualized people is a sense of purpose — discovering our calling in life and using such knowledge to guide us in our decisions.
Humanitarianism, the second characteristic, goes hand-in-hand with purpose.
Purpose grows from our ability to make a difference in other people’s life. We all have an innate need to do things that extend beyond ourselves.
A sense of purpose appears to have evolved in humans so that we can accomplish big things together — it is built into our DNA.
Every one of us has a WHY, a deep-seated purpose, cause or belief that is the source of our passion and inspiration.
More than any other factor finding our sense of purpose, one that is rooted in our capacity to help people around us, is the chief contributor to a self-actualized life.
As Martin Luther King Jr. expressed it: “We have a responsibility to set out to discover what we are made for, to discover our life’s work, to discover what we are called to do. And after we discover that, we should set out to do it with all the strength and all of the power that we can muster.”
This “life’s work” is what we were intended to do, as dictated by our particular skills, gifts, and inclinations.
It is our calling in life.
Finding this higher sense of purpose gives us the integration and direction we all crave.
Once we find our WHY, our moments of doubt, even our failures have a purpose — to toughen us up. With such energy and direction, our actions have unstoppable force.
As Friedrich Nietzsche noted, “He who has a why to live can bear with almost any how.”
Life is unpredictable.
Just when you think that you have figured it out, life throws a curveball and disrupts everything.
If you need everything in life to be in order before you can find fulfillment, you will never ascend into self-actualization.
Equanimity is the quality of mind that can find calm in chaos. Such a mind does not need the world to be in perfect order to relax.
The first step to find equanimity is to understand a destructive flaw of our mind: Negativity Bias. Our minds have evolved to exaggerate all negative events, to blow it out of proportion.
We worry too much about things that just don’t matter. Due to an odd quirk of evolution we are stuck with a mind that is constantly worried. Which is why it is all the more important to not get carried away when it acts out.
Epictetus advices, “It is not external events themselves that cause us distress, but the way in which we think about them, our interpretation of their significance. It is our attitudes and reactions that give us trouble. We cannot choose our external circumstances, but we can always choose how we respond to them.”
Life is not about getting rid of problems, it’s about getting better at dealing with problems. No matter how much you succeed, the mind will always find a reason to worry, it will find new problems to blow out of proportion.
When the mind does what it does, our job is to slowly pull ourselves back into reality. This equanimity is a crucial step on our path to self-actualization.
It is so easy to take life for granted. Human beings have an extraordinary capacity to habituate to things around them.
Even lottery winners, after a few months of elevated happiness, return to their baseline happiness.
We buy a new car, we are excited for a few weeks, then we don’t even notice it. Where is that excitement you felt when you bought your new iPhone?
Self-actualized individuals, on the other hand, cultivate an ability to find awe and wonder in the everyday life. They actively cultivate an ability to appreciate the beauty that surrounds them.
We are the only species that spends countless hours making things prettier. We are the only species that spends its precious time on earth making songs more beautiful, play with legos, write poems, paint Sistine Chapel.
We are the making ape. It is built into the core of our being.
To walk into self-actualization, we need to awaken our inner creative and embrace it’s quirkiness.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s work on flow is one of the most cited studies in psychology. According to him, flow is more than just an optimal state of consciousness, it also appears to be the only practical answer to the question: What is the meaning of life?
Most of us have at least passing familiarity with flow. If you’ve ever lost an afternoon to a great conversation or gotten so involved in a work project that all else is forgotten, then you’ve tasted the experience.
Self-actualized people tend to spend significant portion of their life lost in a state of flow.
Take the test to figure out how you stack up on each of these qualities. Capitalize on your highest characteristics but also don’t forget to be mindful about what might be blocking your self-actualization.
Identify your patterns and make a concerted effort to change. Create habits that moves up you up on each characteristics.
One step at a time, we can all climb up the pyramid.
10 Qualities For Self-Actualization in the 21st Century
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