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It sounded, I told him, as if he had never learned to balance projecting goals into the future with appreciating and living in the present....To the extent that our goal is to "prove" ourselves or ward off the fear of failure, this balance is difficult to achieve. We are too driven. Not joy but anxiety is our motor.But if our aim is self-expression rather than self-justification, the balance tends to come more naturally. We will still need to think about its daily implementation, but the anxiety of wounded self-esteem will not make the task nearly impossible.

It sounded, I told him, as if he had never learned to balance projecting goals into the future with appreciating and living in the present....To the extent that our goal is to "prove" ourselves or ward off the fear of failure, this balance is difficult to achieve. We are too driven. Not joy but anxiety is our motor.But if our aim is self-expression rather than self-justification, the balance tends to come more naturally. We will still need to think about its daily implementation, but the anxiety of wounded self-esteem will not make the task nearly impossible.

Approximate author period: c. 1972 AD · modern

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Attribution & collection notes
Author or tradition
Nathaniel Branden
Attribution: attributed
Country attributed
Not established
A country attribution does not establish the earliest origin.
Historical period
Approximate author period: c. 1972 AD · modern
Approximate author-period evidence for Nathaniel Branden: life dates 1930 to 2014. Wikidata Q741456, inspected 2026-10-08. Not a quotation composition date or independent verification of attribution. Source: https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q741456 (accessed 2026-10-08).
An author lifetime, approximate period or collection date is not necessarily the date when these words were first written or spoken.
Recorded source
Contributor-provided quotation collection

Supplied reference C; CSV row 213246; supplied attribution, independently unverified

A collection's publication date can be later than the words it records.