efficacy. As the child learns to move his body, to crawl, to walk, to bang a spoon against a table and produce a
sound, to build a structure of blocks, to pronounce words, the enjoyment he exhibits is that of a living being gaining
power over its own existence. It is profoundly significant, psychologically and morally, that a child begins his life
by experiencing the sense of virtue and the sense of efficacy as a single, indivisible emotion; pride is inextricably
tied to achievement.
It is this form of pleasure that a psychologically healthy man never loses; it remains a central motive of his life.
This attitude accounts for the phenomenon of the mentally active man who is young at ninety—just as the absence
of this attitude accounts for the phenomenon of the mentally passive man who is old at thirty.
It should be stressed that all of the above considerations apply to women no less than to men. It is beyond the scope
of this analysis to discuss the incalculable damage that has been wrought by the conventional view that the pursuit
of a productive career is an exclusively masculine prerogative, and that women should not aspire to any role or
function other than that of wife and mother. A woman's psychological well-being requires that she be engaged in a
long-range career; she is not some sort of second-class citizen, metaphysically, for whom mental passivity and
dependence are a natural condition.^3
The scope of a person's productive ambition reflects, not only the range of his intelligence, but, most crucially, the
degree of his self-esteem. The higher the level of a man's self-esteem, the higher the goals he sets for himself and
the more demanding the challenges he tends to seek. (This refers, of course, to healthy, rational forms of
ambition—not to the pretentious aspirations of a self-doubting individual who is struggling to evade and deny his
own deficiencies.) On any level of intelligence or ability, one of the characteristics of self-esteem is a man's
eagerness for the new and the challenging, for that which will allow him to use his capacities to the fullest extent—
just as a fondness for the familiar, the routine, the unexacting, and a fear of the new and the difficult, is a virtually
unmistakable indication of a self-esteem deficiency. In the realm of his work, the primary desire of a man of self-
confidence is to face challenges, to achieve and to grow; the primary desire of the man lacking in self-confidence is
to be "safe."