An Autotelicself is an individual who strives to be in the flow. The flow is how a person becomes so involved in an activity and sets their minds to it till the individual is fully satisfied. However, an autotelicself will not know which goals are good and which goals are bad; thus not knowing which goal to choose from and which not to. In the following paragraphs, I will explain why an autotelicself cannot choose from good goals to bad goals instead of just following any goal that comes to the mind.
"Selecting a goal is related to the recognition of challenges." (page 192) From the following sentence out of the article, one can see that any person from a small child to a grown adult can select goals to a specific challenge in life. Lets say a kid decides to seek revenge on kids bullying in class? The goal of the kid should be if anything, stand up for him/herself and direct their energy to reporting to school authorities to report the bullying. Yet, the same kid might want to carry a gun to school and set another goal, to seek revenge by firing at the bullying kids. Same life challenge of "seeking revenge"; yet 2 terribly different goals. What is right and what is wrong for an autotelicself is merely anything that satisfies the mind. We can direct more examples not only from the article itself, but from the recent school shootings in San Diego. The kids most likely are autotelicself's and they arose from challenges of reporting bully's to the authority's but failed!.
and created a more life threatening goal which ultimately, landed in what we know today; bloodshed.
"One basic differences between autotelicself and one without it is that, the former knows that it is she who has chosen whatever goal she is pursing". (page 192) Again, we see that, an autotelicself is very stubborn. Once a goal has been chosen, be it right or wrong, the autotelicself will be very stubborn and make sure that the goal is met not knowing if the outcome is good or the outcome is bad.