Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live

by Martha N. Beck

The problem isn’t that Melvin’s social self is a bad person—in fact, it’s a very good person. It has the horsepower to get Melvin all the way to his North Star. But only his essential self can tell him where that is.

The best way to make your fortune in today’s economic climate is to master the spontaneous, creative “not-doing” of the essential self.

Everybody seems to know what Everybody thinks. It’s fascinating to get a bunch of people together to ask about Everybody, because, though each individual is convinced that he or she has a finger on the pulse of some universal Zeitgeist, each of their Everybodies turns out to be a very small slice of the human pie. Your view of Everybody is completely different from my view of Everybody, which is completely different from, say, Saddam Hussein’s view of Everybody.

“I’d be happy if Bill loved me and Alice stopped shooting heroin” may be an accurate statement, but it’s not very useful; there’s no way to force true love from Bill, and ultimately, you can’t control Alice’s addiction. If your needs are being frustrated by another person’s behavior, it’s especially important to ask “Why?” enough times to reach the root of your feelings, where they can be expressed in terms of your needs, not other people’s behavior.