As we begin the year 2026, New Year's resolutions abound, often centering on greater career success. For those grappling with this topic, you'll find a relevant but little-known key concept in Maslow's work: the Jonah Complex. His colleague, historian Frank Manuel at Brandeis University, formulated the initial notion, which Maslow found vital for understanding personal achievement—and its delay or absence. As he wrote late in life, "We have, all of us, an impulse to improve ourselves...toward self-actualization, or whatever term you like. Granted this, what holds us up? What blocks us?" The question is not only pertinent to New Year's resolutions, but to all our goals, plans, and attempts at accomplishment.

Maslow saw the biblical Book of Jonah as providing an answer. It related how the prophet Jonah was tasked with a difficult divine mission to perform. Fearful of failure, he attempted to flee from it. While doing so, Jonah was thrown overboard from a storm-tossed ship and swallowed by a huge fish. Swathed unharmed in its belly, Jonah finally accepted his mission and was thereupon thrown up onto the shore so he could perform his appointed task.

In Maslow’s secularized view of this biblical tale, virtually all people experience a harsh ambivalence about fulfilling their life purpose based on their unique mental and physical traits. "We fear our highest possibilities, as well as our lowest ones," he poetically wrote. "We are generally afraid to become that which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments...in........

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