This book is a reader-friendly description of a viewpoint on human behavior which sees all behavior as aimed at attaining goals. A wide variety of topics are treated: ranging from goals, to emotion, to persistence and giving up, to living and dying. Both adaptive behavior and problems are examined. The book blends ideas that have long been part of self-regulation models with ideas that are recently emergent in psychology: dynamic systems and catastrophe theory. It also blends theoretical statement with wide-ranging discussion of issues.