Sublime

certain needs trump others and you must satisfy lower-level needs before focusing on higher-level ones.

Cross-cultural studies have found that happiness does indeed correlate with meeting five broad categories of needs: physiological, safety and security, love and belonging, status, and self-actualisation. However, the pyramid-shaped hierarchy (which was made up by business consultants, and has nothing to do with Maslow) is wrong: the exact order doe

“Maslow’s Pyramid” was actually created by a management consultant in the sixties.

The theme of self-transcendence and the dissolution of ego has begun to appear more and more prominently in Western psychology since the 1960s. The transpersonal movement was anticipated by Abraham Maslow, one of the pioneers in humanistic psychology, itself a rebellion against the overly restrictive view of human nature promulgated by proponents o

Polymaths like Alberti constantly strove to attain their optimal state of being. Optimality is the fullest realisation of one's potential; it is different from pursuing an illusory ‘perfection’. Maslow said that ‘what a man can be, he must be’ and that one only attains a state of self-actualisation when ‘one becomes everything that one is capable o

Maslow maintained that human motivation had deeper causes and a loftier purpose. Our highest need—indeed, what makes us human—was what he called self-actualization, the yearning to engage our talents and realize our potential.