One of the most legendary ideas in the 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 text. It has since become a mainstay of psychological analyses,
business presentations and TED Talks – and grown ever more colourful 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 had 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 their capacity to capture, with elemental simplicity, a profound structural truth about
human existence. Maslow was putting his finger, with unusual deftness and precision, on a
set of answers to very large questions that tend to confuse and perplex us viciously,
particularly when we are young, namely: What are we really after? What do 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, 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 can pay the bills at the end of the month. Operating
at the heyday of American capitalism, Maslow was interestingly ambivalent about business.
He was awed by the material resources of large corporations around him but at the same time
he lamented that almost all their economic activity was – unfairly and bizarrely – focused
on honouring customers’ needs at the bottom of his pyramid. America’s largest companies
were helping people to have a roof of 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 defined 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 are 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 the opposite problem, where we have not paid due head to our need to look
after our fragile and vulnerable bodies. Maslow was pointing us to the need for a greater
balance between the many priorities we must juggle. His 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 is we might do next.
Our Decision Dice are a tool to help you make wiser decisions in Work, Love and the rest of your life.