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 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 you
