This chapter might be euphemistically called a summary of the book “in pictures,” as it includes all of the key graphics used throughout the book to represent the core ideas of MST (including summaries of goal content themes, different kinds of emotion patterns, and personal agency belief patterns), TSP (including representations of the TSP Theory of Motivation and Optimal Functioning and the TSP Theory of Life Meaning), and principles for motivating self and others. This chapter was designed to provide readers with a quick summary of the book’s contents and an easy way to recall key ideas related to the challenge of motivating self and others.

This chapter tells the fascinating story of how human motivational processes evolved from the humblest of creatures, starting with “primordial” goals and precursors of basic emotions. In addition to explaining how our capabilities for self-direction and self-regulation evolved, this chapter provides a way of understanding the complexly organized motivational systems we see in humans in a way that transcends specific motivation theories. It is thus a chapter about the fundamental properties of human nature as they relate to motivation and optimal functioning rather than a chapter about a particular theoretical approach to human motivation. That is an essential framing, as one of the basic premises of this book is that efforts to motivate self and others can best succeed if they are consistent with basic human nature.

This chapter provides a nontechnical introduction to the components of human motivation (goals, emotions, and personal agency beliefs) that capitalizes on the intuitive understandings that readers already have about motivation from their own everyday experience. This is done through thought questions that encompass motivation of both self and others. The concept of “motivation at its (human) best” – what we call Thriving with Social Purpose – is also introduced as an advance organizer for the chapters to follow.