profession. I realized I was largely on my own. Slowly, I started meeting other people who, like me, were building real communities for businesses. I ended up starting a blog and job board called TheCommunityManager.com

Across all four levels of my updated hierarchy of needs is one unifying ingredient: community. Without a community supporting you at each level, it’s nearly impossible to move up the hierarchy. As psychologist Noam Shpancer wrote, “Human beings, fundamentally, are distinctly, spectacularly social. Lonely and isolated, we cannot survive, let alone t