ABSTRACT
In lieu of a fundamental motivational principle to explain why people do the things they do, Kelly proposed that human beings are basically ``forms of motion'' who don't need to be pushed and pulled by internal needs or external stimuli in order to ``emit behavior.'' Instead, he proposed that people are intrinsically active, and our goal as psychologists is to understand not why they act in the ®rst place, but rather in what direction their activity is likely to carry them. For him, the answers were to be found in the network of personal constructs or meanings through which people anticipate the world, and most especially the actions and reactions of other people. This quest to construct and validate a set of reference axes in order to chart action in the social world and to organize one's own actions and commitments in it was for him never ending; we spend a lifetime looking for recurrent themes in events, using them to predict what will happen next, investing our time, effort, resources, and ultimately our lives in varying degrees in these, encountering the relevant events, suffering the invalidation of our hypotheses or celebrating their usefulness, and actively experimenting with revised or deepened convictions as a result. But for better or worse, we never arrive in a ``cognitive Eden'' in which we are forever secure, and where the terrain and rules of the game are stable and familiar. Instead, our forward movement toward an uncertain future is like living on the frontier, confronting challenges and innovating solutions as we move forward, pushing back the boundaries of the known world. In fact, accepting the inevitable anxiety of facing continual novelty can be far healthier, Kelly suggested, than falling back repeatedly on old constructs that may be well
worn, but stultifying, in essence ``choosing'' to live frustrations rather than jettison previous patterns discomforts of reinventing ourselves and our worlds.
