The 33 Marks of Maturity Quotes

“Children, we know, learn to love by being loved — so that the initiative rests with the parent; and we are beginning to realize that most people at all age levels still have enough of the child in them that they can respond to good will more readily than they can make the first affirmative move. Thus, in most human relationships, we might say, the initiative rests with the individual who has achieved the parental orientation.” —The Mind Alive”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“The fact that people don’t think about you and what you’re doing nearly as much as you think they do (since, just like you, they’re too busy thinking about themselves) might be a check to the ego. But, it’s also incredibly liberating.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“Rather than requiring all of their experiences to be ready-made, and perfectly presented, the mature possess the creativity needed to make their own fun, and the most of whatever life throws at them.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“The deepest vocational question is not ‘What ought I to do with my life?’” the author Parker J. Palmer writes. “It is the more elemental and demanding ‘Who am I? What is my nature?’” The Overstreets put it this way: as a man matures, he “learns, as it were, where he leaves off and the world begins,” and “his fateful task becomes that of finding out who he is: where he belongs, what he can do, what significance he has.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“It will mean much to our confused and hostility ridden world if and when the conviction begins to dawn that the people we call ‘bad’ are people we should call immature. This conviction would bring us to the realization of what needs to be done if our world is to be rescued from its many defeats. The chief job of our culture is, then, to help all people to grow up.” —The Mature Mind by H. A. Overstreet”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“Because the mature can access multiple layers of every experience and relationship — can suck the marrow out of things the immature ignore or discard — they’re able to keep the familiar perennially fresh, and garner far more joy, from far fewer things.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“An immature approach to life may seem to promise the most freedom, but it invariably restricts our autonomy, as we end up the slaves of our emotions, circumstances, and minds, rather than their masters.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“Once the idea becomes central in our culture that a man is at his best when he is doing his best at what he can do best, many of the present hindrances to a sound maturing will be removed. To mature is to bring one’s powers to realization. To waste those powers, or to force individuals to try to exhibit powers they do not possess, is to defeat the maturing impulse of life.” —The Mature Mind”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“In a world where the faucet of every commodity — food, entertainment, shopping, media, sex — runs 24/7 on full blast, and one can be constantly satiated, if not completely oversaturated, on every possible pleasure, the mature individual intentionally chooses to abstain from certain things, at certain times; he deliberately cultivates a hunger (physical, psychological, or both), a sense of anticipation, that will ultimately heighten, and in some cases even sacralize, the satisfaction and delights of their consummation. He intentionally creates contrast between empty and full, having and having not, so that his life is not one undeviating, unbroken, benumbing stream of stuffed-full sameness, but rather has texture, seasons, expectancy.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“As Overstreet observes, a central aspect to a “true vocation,” is that “it demands intimate knowledge of some kind of working material — some medium that is to be understood and respected, and through which insight and caring can be expressed.” These working materials, these mediums through which one expresses his vocation, concern not only the professional but the relational. Marriage is a vocation; friendship is a vocation; parenthood is a vocation; mentorship is a vocation. In every single dyadic relationship, there is a unique calling to be discovered: Who I am to be to this person? What role am I to play in their life?”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“his esteem isn’t primarily comparative, but centered to a greater extent on living self-set standards and contributing to the world around him — continually striving to best himself. He sees value through a lens of abundance,”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“Added all up, these experiences “make the individual’s present both interesting and negotiable — so that he feels the oncoming future as abundant but not overwhelming.” They allow a man to step out in the glow of faith his maturity has already kindled, and toward an even greater light illuminating the yet distant uplands of adulthood.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“Finally, his experiences with life’s undulating course — its ups and downs — have given him a visceral conviction of the truth found in that old maxim: “This too, shall pass.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“It is characteristic of the person who is emotionally in health that he can ‘make do’ with fewer guarantees than can the emotionally disturbed person. . . . He does not need, therefore, what amounts to a guarantee that his truth is the truth or is all truth, or that his actions will inevitably be crowned with success. Since he experiences, by and large, an inner state of happiness and freedom, he can take it more or less for granted that he has somehow got hold of enough truth to go on for the time being — and that more is likely to come when he has gone far enough to need and find it.” —The Mind Alive One of the places that mature courage is most needed is in exercising the capacity to move forward on faith. The Overstreets argue that the mature mind is one that is comfortable acting on a “faith in life,” which they describe as the psychological “permission” that allows the emotionally healthy man “to go on from where he is,” “to go further into experience than he has ever yet gone,” “to go beyond the known into the not yet known, beyond the tried into the not yet tried.” Part of the kind of black and white thinking that marks the adolescent mind is the desire to possess absolute knowledge before committing to an idea or path. To have all the answers before moving forward or throwing one’s hat in the ring. The mature person has a higher tolerance for mystery and uncertainty; he doesn’t have to have everything figured out in order to take a step into the darkness. This ability to grapple with the unknown, the Overstreets argue, grows out of the mature individual’s substantial, varied experiences with diving deep into life.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“The word reliable has its origins in relier, Old French for “fasten” or “attach”; the reliable man is an immovable pillar of strength — someone you can hang your hat on, lean and depend on, trust implicitly. The pointed end of a compass around which everything turns. Being reliable means keeping your promises, managing expectations, following through on obligations, acting consistently, pulling your weight, and showing up. Always showing up.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“They still primarily try to get what they want by manipulating others, by having a “tantrum,” by metaphorically quivering their lip or soiling their pants and then waiting for someone to notice. They wait for a solution to their problems to arrive from the outside. Maturing means growing in your capability to meet your own needs, as you become progressively more skilled, competent, and emotionally intelligent. And it means becoming less needy in general. As Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “Can anything be so elegant as to have few wants and to serve them oneself?” No one ever becomes completely independent of other people, and it would not be desirable to do so. But when you do need help, you ask for it directly. You don’t expect other people to read your mind, and then act put out when they fail to manifest these psychic powers. Many a relationship is sunk by such implicit assumptions: “You should know how I feel without my saying so.” “You should know what I need without my telling you.” Maturing means growing out of an indirect, infantile, dependent way of meeting your needs, and into a direct, mature, independent approach to obtaining what you want.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“Recognizes the Wisdom of Fundamental Truths “All the necessary truths have been spoken. Many of them, in fact are part of our daily speech; are said with reverence in our moments of worship; are, on great occasions, delivered as axioms of wisdom. Why have they been so relatively powerless to shape our daily behavior?” —The Mature Mind Overstreet helpfully reiterates the above question this way: “since we have long known the most inspired truths about human behavior and human relationships, why have we failed to put those truths into action?” Why is it that “A number of saving insights have been brought into the world without any of them saving the world”? The answer to this line of inquiry, he says, is that “a mature truth told to immature minds ceases, in those minds, to be that same mature truth. Immature minds take from it only what immature minds can assimilate.” Most of us have had the experience where the wisdom of a timeless aphorism or principle that we heard, and ignored, as a child is suddenly revealed. To the immature, these “ah-ha” moments come more slowly, if at all. They spend their time looking for completely novel answers or pathways, feeling that timeworn truths are too simple and too common to hold much value. Or they acknowledge the existence of such truths, but believe they themselves are exceptions to the rules, and thus fruitlessly seek to circumvent them. The mature recognize fundamental truths, respecting the fact that they, too, are subject to the unchanging laws that structure reality, even as they seek to do something wildly original.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“The mature are flexible. They can see opportunities in the new path set by the curveball. They can reframe any situation into something more positive.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“The immature content themselves with being able to effectively manipulate the basics needed to perpetuate their daily existence. The mature never lose the satisfaction of finding new ways to use the self to influence the non-self. Throughout their lives, they continue to gain in competence, and the more domains they master, the more confident they feel in trying new things. Efficacy (the ability to make things happen) leads to greater self-efficacy (the belief that one possesses said ability), which in turn increases efficacy, in an endlessly virtuous circle.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“This whole adventure of becoming intimate with what lies beyond the self is open to him, however, only as he focuses his attention outward; only as he lends himself to his world with enough concentration and interest that it reveals to him one aspect after another of its nature.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“The author Stephen Pressfield says that in pursuing any creative endeavor, an artist will inevitably confront Resistance: “an impartial force of nature, like gravity and the laws of thermodynamics” that works to keep everything as it is.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“Owns Up to Mistakes “The greatest of faults, I should say, is to be conscious of none.” —Thomas Carlyle If there is one hallmark of maturity that is universally agreed upon, it is personal responsibility — the ability to recognize when one has made a mistake and to own up to it. And to do so quickly, forthrightly, and without excuse. The reason it’s hard to admit to messing up is that it depreciates your self-concept — your vision of yourself as really being a great guy. So to protect the ego, you come up with justifications — which feel like rational explanations rather than lies — for why you had to do what you did. You blame your mood or the unique circumstances. You say someone “made” you do it — that you were provoked. You engage in “if-only” reasoning: “If only you didn’t push my buttons, I wouldn’t lose my temper”; “If only this job paid better, I wouldn’t have to skim extra money off the top.” It’s easier to fess up to mistakes when the gap between these lapses and our self-concept has been shrunken — by humility. We still think well of ourselves, but also realize we’re a little flawed, a little broken, and imperfectly human. We use this recognition not to justify our misbehavior but as a way to more readily recognize our shortcomings, apologize for them, and get to work on their improvement. In the mode of mature personal responsibility there are no apologies with caveats, no “Sorry, but’s . . .” Just the frank ownership of error. Yet there is no room for excess self-flagellation, either. The mature individual recognizes the mistake, confesses it, and offers restitution if possible/necessary. Then, he moves on and tries to be better in the future. He neither ignores his mistakes, nor allows them to push him into a place of demoralizing regret and rumination. He sees them as important learning experiences. As put by the authors of Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me), mature individuals “see mistakes not as terrible personal failings to be denied or justified, but as inevitable aspects of life that help us grow, and grow up.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“As the child grows up, he realizes that everyone around him suffers from flaws, and he is often greatly disappointed (there’s that word again) by the discovery. If he never matures further, he goes through life feeling frustrated and let down that friends, family, and public figures do not live up to who and what he believes they should be to him. If he does mature, he comes to realize that other people’s flaws are often inextricably connected to virtues — that each represents different sides of the very same coin. The same energy that causes someone to be flaky, flighty, moody, or demanding, may also be what respectively makes them creative, adventurous, empathetic, or high-achieving. The mature come to realize that you can’t pick up one end of the stick of a person’s personality, without picking up the other — that what you most dislike about someone is frequently tied to what you most love. One can even come to exercise patience with those flaws in another which aren’t even connected to his or her virtues. As C.S. Lewis writes, the mature come to realize that it’s possible to love someone who’s damaged, since that’s exactly how you love yourself: “I remember Christian teachers telling me long ago that I must hate a bad man’s actions but not hate the bad man . . . I used to think this a silly, straw-splitting distinction: how could you hate what a man did and not hate the man? But years later it occurred to me that there was one man to whom I had been doing this all my life — namely myself. However much I might dislike my own cowardice or conceit or greed, I went on loving myself. There had never been the slightest difficulty about it.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“No one is mature except to the extent that there is a work he accepts as his own, that he performs with a fair degree of expertness, and from which he draws a sense of significance.” —The Mature Mind”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“The mature step off the treadmill, by looking for more not horizontally, but vertically. Rather than hungrily groping outward, they attentively drill downward.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“In Man’s Search for Himself (1953), psychologist Rollo May observed: “It is not generally realized how closely one’s sense of humor is connected with one’s sense of selfhood. Humor normally should have the function of preserving the sense of self. . . . It is the healthy way of feeling a ‘distance’ between one’s self and the problem, a way of standing off and looking at one’s problems with perspective. . . . so long as a person has genuine humor — so long that is, as he can laugh, or look at himself with the thought, as one person put it, ‘What a crazy person I’ve been!’ — he is preserving his identity as a self. When any of us, neurotic or not, get insights into our psychological problems, our spontaneous reaction is normally a little laugh — the ‘aha’ of insight.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“But to avoid being a slave to the opinions of others, overly craving pats on the head, and then selling out in your decisions in order to satiate an all-consuming need to hold onto status, the remaining 51% of your drive should arise from intrinsic motivation — the desire to do things simply because you love to do them, because they align with your inner values, because you get a rise out of forwarding your purpose.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“The mature man stays ever aware that every cause has an effect, even if the effect takes weeks, months, or even years to materialize. He realizes that each of the effects from a single cause, beget new causes, that in turn spawn their own infinitely radiating rings of consequences. He knows that the “scientific” laws that govern success in any human endeavor are just as irrevocable as those that govern the physical universe.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“Cares for Something/Someone Outside the Self “It is the capacity to care — to care intensely about something beyond the limited self — that we seem to find our best clue to what mature individuality is.” —The Mind Alive The Overstreets convincingly argue that, for several reasons, the capacity to deeply care for someone or something forms the very core of the mature mind. First, it slays adolescent ego-absorption by shifting an individual’s focus outside the self, and training that focus on something bigger than the self. Second, it requires the “emotional overflow” of well-developed inner resources, particularly the development of courage, as sincerely caring is underrated as a truly frightening endeavor: “Caring — whether for another person, a line of work, a field of knowledge, or a conviction — is, in a sense, the most hazardous of human experiences. The emotionally impoverished person cannot afford it; for it means choosing to be vulnerable. . . . There is, in psychological truth, a certain terror that is part of the experience of deep caring: the terror of letting one’s self go; putting one’s whole capacity to feel and suffer at the disposal of something beyond the self. No one, it seems safe to assume, who has ever deeply and genuinely loved another human being or a chosen vocation or a social cause or a religious faith has ever wholly escaped this terror.” Third, it is the only way to catalyze one’s full potential: “If the risks of caring are great, so are the rewards; for it is one of the basic facts of human life that the ungiven self is the unfulfilled self. Only the individual who builds a strong, sound relationship with his world can himself become strong, sound, and resourceful: ready for what happens; able to be affirmative and creative in his dealings with experience.” Caring is such a key element of human fulfillment, in part because it provides a non-duplicable source of motivation:   “If a person never greatly cares about anything beyond himself, he has little spontaneous reason to get over the hump of inertia and submit himself to the discipline of a working material or a body of knowledge. . . . an individual’s area of caring and the strength of his caring determine the inconveniences he will willingly suffer and the risks he will run.” Finally, the practice of caring for things outside the self — a process in which the arrows of influence and need work both ways — disabuses you of delusional notions of complete autonomy and control (ideals maturity approaches, but can never completely attain, nor would find desirable to attain); it serves as a visceral, humbling reminder of where you remain (wonderfully) dependent. In caring for some person or idea, you come to an understanding of humanity’s interconnectedness, a “sense of how things hang together; not just the thing itself, but the meaning of it.” As the Overstreets conclude, “the capacity to care — to enjoy richly, love deeply, feel strongly, and if need be, suffer intensely — is, in short, the best guarantee any one of us can have against” the complete stagnation of the self.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity

“Maturity, then, requires the wisdom to let things go that really aren’t worth addressing, aren’t worth suffering emotional upset over — to stoically decide that the buzzing about your ears need not affect you. At the same time, it means not ignoring issues that are worth raising, not letting laziness or cowardliness or apathy become an excuse for passivity when something of true significance ought to be engaged, grappled with, spoken up for.”
― Brett McKay, The 33 Marks of Maturity