The idea is genuinely Maslow’s, but this is not how he put it. In The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (Viking, 1971), in chapter 2 — “Neurosis as a Failure of Personal Growth,” pp. 33–35, where he introduces the Jonah complex — the sentence is reported as “If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life.” The tidier “plan on being anything less … unhappy all the days of your life” version is a later rewrite: Wikiquote files it under Attributed, and the only citation it can offer is a 2004 self-help book.
“If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life” Not Maslow's wording. In 'Neurosis as a Failure of Personal Growth' (The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Viking, 1971, pp. 33-35), where he introduces the Jonah complex, he is recorded as writing: 'If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you'll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.' The popular version — 'If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life' — is a later paraphrase; Wikiquote lists it as Attributed, citing only a 2004 self-help book. — Quotle.info
Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool
In context
Evoking the themes of purpose, growth and happiness. Theme: "If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Minimalist
Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
Provenance
The sentence in the book
Documented in
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
Chapter
2. “Neurosis as a Failure of Personal Growth,” pp. 33–35
First published
New York: Viking Press, 1971
Popular wording
No sourced instance in Maslow — Wikiquote files it under Attributed
If you deliberately plan to be less than you are capable of being, then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life. You will be evading your own capacities, your own possibilities.
What Maslow actually wrote
These sentences follow the classroom question — “Which of you in this class hopes to write the great American novel, or to be a Senator, or Governor, or President?” — which appears in exactly that form in the Internet Archive’s full-text index of the 1971 Viking scan; the Counselling Study Resource ↗ transcribes the same passage from pp. 33–34, lowercasing the offices. The scan itself is lending-restricted, so the excerpt above is taken from sources that quote and cite the book rather than read off the page — and an exact-phrase search of that index does not return the warning sentence, which may reflect the printed wording or simply OCR and line breaks.
Wikiquote does not put this sentence among Maslow’s sourced quotations at all — it sits in the Attributed section, cited to Joan Neehall-Davidson’s Perfecting Private Practice (2004), p. 95 (Wikiquote ↗).
The wording Maslow is actually recorded as using belongs to chapter 2 of The Farther Reaches of Human Nature — “Neurosis as a Failure of Personal Growth,” pp. 33–35, where the Jonah complex is introduced. The sentence itself is quoted verbatim, and credited to that book, by Academy of Ideas ↗; a counselling study resource transcribes the surrounding passage and cites the same pages (PDF ↗), though its transcription stops at the classroom question and does not carry the warning.
The book itself is catalogued as New York: Viking Press, 1971 — published after Maslow’s death in June 1970 (Internet Archive record ↗).
Independent writing on the Jonah complex quotes the “deliberately plan” wording verbatim and credits it to that book, never to the smoothed version (Academy of Ideas ↗).
The Farther Reaches of Human Nature was first published by Viking Press in 1971, so it remains under US copyright — the excerpt here is quoted briefly for identification and comment. The popular paraphrase has no identified author or first publication at all, so no rights status can honestly be claimed for it.
Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.
Fact-check
How the wording drifted
Nobody is stealing this line from another author — the thinking is unmistakably Maslow’s. What is wrong is the sentence itself, and the confident way it is presented as a direct quotation.
✕
The exact wordingAbraham Maslow Attributed
Wikiquote lists “If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life” in its Attributed section, and the only citation it offers is Joan Neehall-Davidson, Perfecting Private Practice (2004), p. 95 — a book published thirty-odd years after Maslow’s death, not anything he wrote (Wikiquote ↗).
✕
Quote aggregatorsAbraham Maslow Unsourced
Goodreads and its imitators print the smoothed version with no book, no chapter and no page — Goodreads’ own page carries the notice that quotes are added by users and are not verified (Goodreads ↗).
✓What Maslow is recorded as writing, in chapter 2 of The Farther Reaches of Human Nature — “Neurosis as a Failure of Personal Growth,” where the Jonah complex is introduced — is sharper: a personal warning about deliberately planning to be less, and about evading your own capacities (wording quoted verbatim and credited to the book ↗).
Context
The classroom question behind it
Maslow called it the Jonah complex — after the prophet who ran from what he was called to do — and he had a party trick for demonstrating it. He would ask a lecture room, in the wording the book’s own scan preserves, “Which of you in this class hopes to write the great American novel, or to be a Senator, or Governor, or President?” The room would squirm. That squirm, he argued, was the whole problem: we are frightened of our best possibilities, not only our worst (Counselling Study Resource ↗).
The warning that follows is the sentence the internet remembers — badly. Maslow wrote it as a warning delivered in the second person, hedge-free: deliberately plan to be less, and you will be deeply unhappy for the rest of your life, evading your own capacities. Somewhere between the 1971 book and the poster industry it was sanded down into something gentler and more quotable, and it is the sanded version that now circulates under his name.
Maslow’s own label for it was blunter: “fear of one’s own greatness.”
What actually changed in the rewrite
Two changes every rendering of Maslow’s sentence agrees on. Then I warn you that you’ll be deeply unhappy — a direct, personal warning — becomes the hedged you will probably be unhappy. And for the rest of your life becomes the biblical-sounding all the days of your life. A third change is real but harder to pin down: Maslow’s opening carries deliberately, which the popular version drops altogether — though the sources we could check disagree over whether he wrote deliberately plan to be less or deliberately plan on being less, and we have not read the printed page.
None of that makes the sentiment un-Maslovian; it makes the sentence a paraphrase. If you need to quote him, quote the version that is actually in the book — and cite the book.
Explore
Filed under
More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.
1908–1970 · American psychologist, founder of humanistic psychology
Abraham Maslow was an American psychologist who taught at Brooklyn College and Brandeis University and gave the world the hierarchy of needs and popularized the term self-actualization, which he took from Kurt Goldstein and credited to him. He spent his last decade arguing that psychology had studied damage far more carefully than it had studied flourishing, and that most people quietly settle for less than they could be. He died in June 1970; The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, the collection that carries this passage, appeared in 1971.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Cite this page
Abraham H. Maslow, “Neurosis as a Failure of Personal Growth,” in The Farther Reaches of Human Nature (New York: Viking Press, 1971), pp. 33–35. The popular wording — “If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being…” — is not Maslow’s; Wikiquote lists it under Attributed, citing only Joan Neehall-Davidson, Perfecting Private Practice (2004), p. 95.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘If you plan on being anything less than you are capable of being, you will probably be unhappy all the days of your life’?” Last verified 24 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/if-you-plan-on-being-anything-less-than-you-are-capable-of/