In this section of the book, I will describe the time period that begins when I begin to discover who I am and the things that I want out of life. I had started Georgia Tech as an engineer because I had no idea what mattered to me and what would make me happy.

Success and accomplishment had not made me happy in life. Not really. That's not entirely true, when I went off to college and started making friends, making connections, I had done that all on my own. That was an amazing accomplishment and one of many successes.

Psychology had taught me that people have certain motivations. This is from Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs which is a well-known theory in psychology. Abraham Maslow postulated that we have different levels of needs which amount to a hierarchy. At the lowest levels, there are survival needs - food, water, safety. Once these are achieved, we can strive for high-level needs. We can pursue meaningful relationships, self-esteem needs, and at the top is self-actualization.

For me, success would be defined by my relationships with others. This is expressed even in my career in social work. That should be self-evident since social work is about things related to our social lives. It's more complicated than that. Social workers do seek to address the most essential and basic needs of people, but you get the idea.

Meaning and happiness forme would rest around a single main organization theme or principle that onemight call "social" or something to that effect. Helping others tofind true happiness, peace, connections, and self-actualization would occupy mymind from this point forward. This is what mattered most to me. No wonderengineering was so wrong for me!