did you know maslow did not create the hierarchy of needs pyramid

The desire to be your best self is not just a nice idea; it’s a need. I’m sure many of you have heard of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. It’s a pyramid and it outlines our core motivations. At the base we have our basic physical needs like food, water, shelter, clothes, sleep, etc. Next comes safety and security, love and belonging, self-esteem and lastly, self-actualization. What’s interesting to me is that Maslow is not the one who conceptualized the pyramid to represent this theory. A while back I ran into the research of Scott Kaufman, a psychologist from Colombia University. He studied Maslow extensively and he found that the iconic pyramid wasn’t present in any of Maslow’s writings. We’re talking not in his published books, articles, diaries, letters or memos. So where the heck did it come from?

The pyramid first appeared in a management textbook and was ultimately someone else’s interpretation of his work. It’s fair to note that Maslow did not refute the pyramid. Kaufman theorizes that Maslow actually believed that we can have many needs at once from many different tiers. We don’t necessarily have to have every single one of the lower needs met before higher level needs emerge. In fact, perhaps a pyramid isn’t the best representation of how needs work.

I think this is an important distinction. Because it means that life does not need to be absolutely stable and peachy in order to feel the call towards self actualization. It’s not like we have to have confidence or ease in every area of our life before we become ourselves. It suggests that we can very much be works in progress and still be driven by a need to fully express. It’s not just for the saints and sages.

What was also interesting that I’ll have to come back to is around some of his later writings around self-actualization, some which were never published. He found a paradoxical relationship between self-actualization and self-transcendence suggesting that we must be willing to let go of the sense of who we are to become who we really are. Say what!