The contributors of this special issue were asked to articulate their own individual philosophies and the lessons they have learned based on their own experience as theoreticians. All of the papers offer authentic, deeply felt, and extremely valuable perspectives on diverse aspects of theory construction in social-personality psychology. The goal is to furnish a useful basis for starting a serious discussion about the considerable challenges of theorizing, the ways of meeting those challenges, and the great rewards that successful theorizing offers to its practitioners and to the discipline as a whole.