In the book, you will learn about:

• the five different life pathways that we all follow and shows us how to get on the road to long-term happiness.

• why I claim that the notion of the universal "midlife crisis" is a myth

• what is wrong with Gail Sheehy's Passages model of age-based predictable stages

• how the key to attaining fulfillment is maintaining an open, flexible, and adaptive approach to life

• why personal development doesn't end in your youth and that it's never too late to make a change

• what is important about building a "legacy" to help create a lasting feeling of fulfillment

 The five pathways that have emerged from my research on personality have captured the variety of ways that we navigate the many challenges and complexities of adulthood.

Meandering Way: you are unable to settle on a clear set of goals and a way to achieve those goals

Straight and Narrow Path: your life is characterized by predictability; you shy away from risk and don't enjoy changing your routines.

Downward Slope: you had everything going for you when you were young, however things started to go wrong and now you regret your choices.

Triumphant Trail: your inner resilience has allowed you to overcome significant challenges that could have led you to despair.

Authentic Road: you have continuously examined your life's direction and forced yourself to take an honest look at whether it is truly satisfying.

You can identify the pathway are you on by taking the short test in the book. Then, just as importantly, you can learn the "action plan" necessary to start to change that pathway if it's one that is blocking your fulfillment.

You can also learn how to stay on a pathway that is allowing you to feel fulfilled. Fortunately, the most frequent pathway I identified was the Authentic Road, but even those people who are on that pathway weren't always there. Many participants in my study got onto that pathway after years of exploring alternatives or deciding to step off a pathway that was preventing them from feeling as fulfilled as possible.

Although the view of personality as stable through life, for better or worse, has persisted since the time of William James, others have challenged this notion. There is increasing evidence that personality traits, thought to be our inborn dispositions, do change through midlife, but not through radical eruptions such as the midlife crisis advocates propose. My book examines in depth the lives of many of the people in my study to show how change can and does occur.

The study of fulfillment has also provided me with personal fulfillment. When I began this research in the late 1970s I was a young assistant professor who through a combination of luck and planning got a hold of a data set from 350 college students tested in the mid 1960s. I was able to track down that sample and have continued to follow them up through their late 50s. Being able to see how they have changed and grown over time has been both inspiring and gratifying. I hope you too will enjoy reading about the unfolding of their lives over the past four decades.

Follow me on Twitter @swhitbo for daily news on psychology, health, and aging. Visit my website at www.searchforfulfillment.com for more resources.

Susan is the author of 15 books including her most recent book, "The Search for Fulfillment."

Copyright Susan Krauss Whitbourne, Ph.D. 2010