About This Book

- 🎭 The book explores the intersection of art and science in personality development. - 🧠 The author learned from influential professors and dedicated the book to their memory. - 🌟 Every human life is a unique work of art, but science helps us find similarities and trends. - 🎯 Personality development involves goals, values, and the construction of a meaningful life. - 🌍 Human beings are naturally social and have evolved to show kindness, cooperation, and altruism.

Top Highlights

• I learned about personality psychology from Professors David McClelland, Brendan Maher, John Kihlstrom, Bonnie Spring, and Ross Rizley. I learned about developmental psychology from Professors Jerome Kagan, Dante Cicchetti, Sheldon White, and Carol Gilligan. I was a teaching assistant for George Goethals’s legendary class “The Psychology of the Hum...
• I had back then, as well as the professors who were so instrumental in my intellectual development before I went off to graduate school—especially Arlin Meyer, Bill Olmsted, and Warren Rubel at Christ College, an honors program in the humanities and social sciences at Valparaiso University.
• Finally, let me gratefully acknowledge the Foley Family Foundation of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which has provided financial support for my research and writing on personality development over the past 15 years, while funding Northwestern University’s Foley Center for the Study of Lives.
• There is a sense in which every human life is a work of art. The product of the artist’s labor is a unique form, a patterning of events, characters, and characteristics that has never happened before, and can never be exactly reproduced again, even if there existed in the universe an ultimate three-dimensional printer. My life can never be exactly ...
• If every human life is a unique work of art, then science enters the picture when we begin to sense regularities amid all the diversity. Science enters when we see rough or approximate similarities amid the cornucopia of differences. As artists, we each fashion a singular, self-affirming life. As scientists, we notice how the life we have fashioned...