one of the most legendary ideas in a
history of psychology is located in an
unassuming triangle divided into five
sections referred to universally simply
as Maslow’s pyramid of needs this
profoundly influential pyramid first saw
the world in an academic journal in the
United States in 1943 where it was
crudely drawn in black and white and
surrounded by dense and jargon rich
texts
it has since become a mainstay of
psychological analyses business
presentations and TED Talks
and grown ever more colorful and
emphatic in the process the pyramid was
the work of a thirty-five year old
Jewish psychologist of Russian origins
called Abraham Maslow who’d been looking
since the start of his professional
career for nothing less than the meaning
of life no longer part of the close-knit
Orthodox family of his youth Maslow
wanted to find out what could make life
purposeful for people himself included
in modern-day America a country where
the pursuit of money and fame seemed to
have eclipsed any more interior or
authentic aspirations he saw psychology
as the discipline that would enable him
to answer the yearnings and questions
that people had once taken to religion
he suddenly saw that human beings could
be said to have essentially five
different kinds of need on the one hand
the psychological or what one could term
without any mysticism being meant by the
word the spiritual and on the other the
material for Maslow we all start with a
set of utterly non-negotiable and basic
physiological needs for food water
warmth and rest in addition we have
urgent safety needs for bodily security
and protection from attack but then we
start to enter the spiritual domain we
need belongingness and love we need
friends and lovers we need esteem and
respect and lastly and most grandly we
are driven by what Maslow called in a
now legendary term
an urge for self-actualization a vast
touchingly nebulous and yet hugely apt
concept involving what Maslow described
as living according to one’s full
potential and becoming who we really are
part of the reason why the description
of these needs laid out in pyramid form
has proved so persuasive is the capacity
to capture a profound structural truth
about human existence Maslow was putting
his finger with unusual deafness and
precision on a set of answers to very
large questions that tend to confuse and
perplex us viciously particularly when
we’re young namely what are we really
after
what are we long for and how do we
arrange our priorities and give due
regard for the different and competing
claims we have on our attention Maslow
was reminding us with artistic concision
of the shape of an ideal well lived life
proposing at once that we cannot live by
our spiritual callings alone but also
that it cannot be right to remain
focused only on the material either we
need in order to be whole both the
material and the spiritual realms to be
attended to the base lending support
while the summit offers upward direction
and definition Maslow was rebutting
calls from two kinds of zealots firstly
over ardent spiritual types who might
urge us to forget entirely about money
housing a good insurance policy and
enough to pay for lunch but he was also
fighting against extreme hard-nosed
pragmatists who might imply that life
was simply a brute process of putting
food on the table and going to the
office both camps had for Maslow
misunderstood the complexity of the
human animal
unlike other creatures we truly are
multifaceted called at once to unfurl
our soul according to its inner destiny
and to make sure we’ll be able to pay
the bills at the end of the month
operating at the heyday of American
capitalism Maslow was interestingly
ambivalent about business he was ordered
by the material resources of large Corp
rations around him but at the same time
he lamented that almost all their
economic activity was unfairly and
bizarrely focused on honoring customers
needs at the bottom of his pyramid
America’s largest companies were helping
people to have a roof over their heads
feeding them moving them around and
ensuring they could talk to each other
long distance but they seemed utterly
uninterested in trying to fulfill the
essential spiritual appetites to find on
the higher slopes of his pyramid towards
the end of his long life Maslow
expressed a hope that businesses could
in time learn to make more of their
profits from addressing not only our
basic needs but also and as importantly
our higher spiritual and psychological
ones as well that would be truly
enlightened capitalism in the personal
sphere Maslow’s pyramid remains a hugely
useful object to turn to whenever we’re
trying to assess the direction of our
lives often as we reflect upon it we
start to notice that we really haven’t
arranged and balanced our needs as
wisely and elegantly
as we might some lives have got an
implausibly wide base all the energy
seems directed towards material
accumulation at the same time there are
lives with an opposite problem where
we’ve not paid to heed to our need to
look after our fragile and vulnerable
bodies Maslow’s beautifully simple
visual cue is above anything else a
portrait of a life lived in harmony with
the complexities of our nature we should
at our less frantic moments use it to
reflect with newfound focus on what it
our decision dice are a tool to help you
make wiser decisions in work love and the rest of your life
history of psychology is located in an
unassuming triangle divided into five
sections referred to universally simply
as Maslow’s pyramid of needs this
profoundly influential pyramid first saw
the world in an academic journal in the
United States in 1943 where it was
crudely drawn in black and white and
surrounded by dense and jargon rich
texts
it has since become a mainstay of
psychological analyses business
presentations and TED Talks
and grown ever more colorful and
emphatic in the process the pyramid was
the work of a thirty-five year old
Jewish psychologist of Russian origins
called Abraham Maslow who’d been looking
since the start of his professional
career for nothing less than the meaning
of life no longer part of the close-knit
Orthodox family of his youth Maslow
wanted to find out what could make life
purposeful for people himself included
in modern-day America a country where
the pursuit of money and fame seemed to
have eclipsed any more interior or
authentic aspirations he saw psychology
as the discipline that would enable him
to answer the yearnings and questions
that people had once taken to religion
he suddenly saw that human beings could
be said to have essentially five
different kinds of need on the one hand
the psychological or what one could term
without any mysticism being meant by the
word the spiritual and on the other the
material for Maslow we all start with a
set of utterly non-negotiable and basic
physiological needs for food water
warmth and rest in addition we have
urgent safety needs for bodily security
and protection from attack but then we
start to enter the spiritual domain we
need belongingness and love we need
friends and lovers we need esteem and
respect and lastly and most grandly we
are driven by what Maslow called in a
now legendary term
an urge for self-actualization a vast
touchingly nebulous and yet hugely apt
concept involving what Maslow described
as living according to one’s full
potential and becoming who we really are
part of the reason why the description
of these needs laid out in pyramid form
has proved so persuasive is the capacity
to capture a profound structural truth
about human existence Maslow was putting
his finger with unusual deafness and
precision on a set of answers to very
large questions that tend to confuse and
perplex us viciously particularly when
we’re young namely what are we really
after
what are we long for and how do we
arrange our priorities and give due
regard for the different and competing
claims we have on our attention Maslow
was reminding us with artistic concision
of the shape of an ideal well lived life
proposing at once that we cannot live by
our spiritual callings alone but also
that it cannot be right to remain
focused only on the material either we
need in order to be whole both the
material and the spiritual realms to be
attended to the base lending support
while the summit offers upward direction
and definition Maslow was rebutting
calls from two kinds of zealots firstly
over ardent spiritual types who might
urge us to forget entirely about money
housing a good insurance policy and
enough to pay for lunch but he was also
fighting against extreme hard-nosed
pragmatists who might imply that life
was simply a brute process of putting
food on the table and going to the
office both camps had for Maslow
misunderstood the complexity of the
human animal
unlike other creatures we truly are
multifaceted called at once to unfurl
our soul according to its inner destiny
and to make sure we’ll be able to pay
the bills at the end of the month
operating at the heyday of American
capitalism Maslow was interestingly
ambivalent about business he was ordered
by the material resources of large Corp
rations around him but at the same time
he lamented that almost all their
economic activity was unfairly and
bizarrely focused on honoring customers
needs at the bottom of his pyramid
America’s largest companies were helping
people to have a roof over their heads
feeding them moving them around and
ensuring they could talk to each other
long distance but they seemed utterly
uninterested in trying to fulfill the
essential spiritual appetites to find on
the higher slopes of his pyramid towards
the end of his long life Maslow
expressed a hope that businesses could
in time learn to make more of their
profits from addressing not only our
basic needs but also and as importantly
our higher spiritual and psychological
ones as well that would be truly
enlightened capitalism in the personal
sphere Maslow’s pyramid remains a hugely
useful object to turn to whenever we’re
trying to assess the direction of our
lives often as we reflect upon it we
start to notice that we really haven’t
arranged and balanced our needs as
wisely and elegantly
as we might some lives have got an
implausibly wide base all the energy
seems directed towards material
accumulation at the same time there are
lives with an opposite problem where
we’ve not paid to heed to our need to
look after our fragile and vulnerable
bodies Maslow’s beautifully simple
visual cue is above anything else a
portrait of a life lived in harmony with
the complexities of our nature we should
at our less frantic moments use it to
reflect with newfound focus on what it
our decision dice are a tool to help you
make wiser decisions in work love and the rest of your life
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