0
0
You have seen the picture. A triangle cut into five colored bands. Food and water at the bottom. Safety above that. Then love, then esteem, and at the very tip, a word that sounds like a prize: self-actualization.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is one of the most famous ideas in the world. People look it up hundreds of thousands of times a month. Students draw it for exams. Managers put it on slides.
But here are two things most people are never told. Abraham Maslow never drew that pyramid. And near the end of his life, he was writing about something he believed sat above the top of it.
What Is Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs?
In 1943, a psychologist named Abraham Maslow wrote a paper called “A Theory of Human Motivation.” His idea was simple. People have needs, and some needs press harder than others.
If you are starving, you do not think much about your reputation. Once you have food, you start to care about being safe. Once you are safe, you start to want people to love you. And so on, up the list.
Maslow named five groups of needs:
- Body needs: food, water, sleep, warmth.
- Safety: a home, health, a world that makes sense.
- Love and belonging: friends, family, being wanted.
- Esteem: respect from others, and respect for yourself.
- Self-actualization: becoming the fullest version of what you could be.
That is the part everyone learns. It is a good idea, and it has helped a lot of people understand why they feel stuck. But the way it gets drawn has quietly changed what it means.
Maslow Never Drew the Pyramid
In 2019, three researchers named Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard went looking for the pyramid in Maslow’s own work. They searched his books, his articles, his private diaries and his archived papers. Their paper, “Who Built Maslow’s Pyramid?”, was published in Academy of Management Learning & Education. They found no trace of a pyramid anywhere.
So where did it come from? The researchers traced it to a consulting psychologist named Charles McDermid. In 1960 he drew it in a business magazine, Business Horizons, in an article called “How Money Motivates Men.” His point was practical: if you know which need a worker is chasing, you can motivate them for less money.
Sit with that for a second. The most famous picture of human longing was first drawn to help companies get the most work for the lowest cost.
The researchers also found that for years, books mostly showed Maslow’s idea as a ladder, not a pyramid. A ladder is closer to what he wrote. You can be on two rungs at once. You can step down and climb back up.
Maslow Said the Levels Are Not a Strict Staircase
Here is something even fans of the pyramid often miss. In that very first 1943 paper, Maslow wrote that the order of needs “is not nearly as rigid as we may have implied.”
He said a new need does not switch on like a light. It grows slowly, “by slow degrees from nothingness.” And he gave an example to show what he meant. He said it was as if the average person was about 85 percent satisfied in body needs, 70 percent in safety, 50 percent in love, 40 percent in esteem, and 10 percent in self-actualization.
Be careful with those numbers. Maslow did not measure them. He said plainly that he was assigning “arbitrary figures for the sake of illustration.” They are a picture, not a finding.
But the picture is the point. Most people are working on every level at once. Nobody finishes the bottom of the pyramid, locks it, and moves upstairs. You can be lonely and hungry in the same week. You can be chasing respect while you still do not feel safe.
That matters if you have ever looked at the pyramid and felt behind. You are not failing a test. You are a normal human being, partly filled on every level, like almost everyone else.
The Level Above Self-Actualization
Maslow kept thinking about all this until he died in 1970. And in his last years, something bothered him.
He had studied people who seemed fully grown. Healthy, capable, creative people. But some of them seemed to want something more than becoming their best selves. They wanted to give themselves to something larger than themselves: a cause, other people, beauty, truth.
Maslow called this transcendence. He wrote about it in papers published in 1969 in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, a journal he helped start. Those writings were gathered into a book, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, published in 1971, the year after he died.
In that book, he described transcendence as the very highest levels of human consciousness, relating “as ends rather than means” to yourself, to the people who matter to you, to human beings in general, to other living things, to nature, and to the cosmos.
In plain words: the highest thing is not getting the most out of life. It is living for something, and for someone, beyond yourself.
Did Maslow Really Add a Sixth Level?
This is where it is worth being precise, because the story often gets told too neatly.
Maslow did not redraw a six-level pyramid. He never drew a pyramid at all. What he did was write, again and again in his last years, about a kind of motivation that goes beyond the self.
In 2006, a psychologist named Mark Koltko-Rivera pulled those late writings together in a paper called “Rediscovering the Later Version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.” He argued that if you take Maslow’s later work seriously, self-transcendence belongs above self-actualization. That reading is now common in psychology, and it is a fair one. But it is a reading of Maslow’s late writing, not a diagram Maslow made.
So the honest version is this: the top of the famous pyramid was not Maslow’s last word. His last word pointed past the self entirely.
Why the Top of the Pyramid Feels Empty
A lot of people reach things they worked hard for and feel strangely flat. The promotion comes. The goal is hit. The body is fit. The life is, by most measures, going well. And there is still a quiet hum of is this it?
Maslow’s late thinking gives that feeling a name. If the highest human need points beyond yourself, then a life organized only around becoming your best self will keep coming up a little short. Not because growth is bad. Because growth was never meant to be the last floor.
You may have felt this in small ways already. The hours that vanish when you are fully absorbed in good work, the kind researchers call a flow state, often come when you forget about yourself for a while. Many people say the best days of their lives were not the days they got something, but the days they gave something.
If you want to put words to what you are reaching for, our free What Is My Purpose? assessment takes a few minutes and might help you name it.
A good place to start:
The Beginner’s Guide to Feeling God’s Presence Every Day
A short video guide and companion PDF for noticing that you are not alone in the ordinary moments of a normal day.
Get the free guide
Free.
The Oldest Version of Maslow’s Last Idea
It is interesting that a modern psychologist, studying healthy people with careful notes, ended up somewhere very old.
Long before anyone drew a pyramid, an ancient piece of wisdom said that the life you clutch tightly, you lose, and the life you give away, you find. Maslow was not writing as a preacher. In fact he spent years arguing that these “peak” moments belong to everyone, not only to religious people. But the shape of what he found is the same shape that people of faith have always called God: something bigger than you, that you were made to live toward, and that does not ask you to finish climbing first.
Maybe that is why the tip of the pyramid can feel lonely. It was never meant to be a summit you stand on alone.
What This Means for an Ordinary Day
You do not need money, a therapist or spare time to try Maslow’s last idea. You only need to point a small part of today away from yourself.
- Do one thing nobody will thank you for. Wash a cup that is not yours. Let someone go first.
- Ask one person a real question, then actually listen to the answer. Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie is, in the end, about one phone call that should have been made.
- Notice one thing bigger than you. The sky, a tree, a child laughing. Stay with it for a full minute.
- Stop grading yourself on the pyramid. Maslow himself said almost nobody is fully satisfied at any level. Neither are you, and that is fine.
The pyramid will probably keep showing up in classrooms and on office walls. That is fine too. Just remember that the man whose name is on it was still looking up when he died, past the top, toward something he could not quite fit inside a triangle.
Discussion Question
Do you think the top of human life is becoming your best self, or giving yourself to something beyond yourself? Or is that a false choice? Tell us what you think in the comments below.
Share This
“Maslow never drew the famous pyramid. It first showed up in a 1960 business article about motivating workers for less money. And Maslow’s last ideas pointed past the top of it. https://bgodinspired.com/?p=117670”
“I always felt behind looking at Maslow’s pyramid. Turns out Maslow said almost everyone is partly filled on every level at once, and the highest need isn’t about yourself at all. This changed how I see it: https://bgodinspired.com/?p=117670”
“What if ‘be your best self’ isn’t the top? Maslow spent his last years writing about the level above it. https://bgodinspired.com/?p=117670”
Q&A: Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs
Did Abraham Maslow draw the pyramid of needs?
No. A 2019 study by Todd Bridgman, Stephen Cummings and John Ballard searched Abraham Maslow’s books, articles, diaries and archived papers and found no pyramid in any of them. The pyramid was first drawn by consulting psychologist Charles McDermid in a 1960 Business Horizons article called “How Money Motivates Men.”
What are the 5 levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?
The five levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, from his 1943 paper “A Theory of Human Motivation,” are physiological needs (food, water, sleep), safety needs, love and belonging needs, esteem needs, and self-actualization, which means becoming the fullest version of what a person can be.
What is above self-actualization in Maslow’s hierarchy?
In his last years, Abraham Maslow wrote about self-transcendence: giving yourself to something beyond yourself, such as other people, a cause, nature or the cosmos. Psychologist Mark Koltko-Rivera argued in 2006 that this belongs above self-actualization as the highest level of Maslow’s later hierarchy, although Maslow himself never drew a six-level diagram.
Do you have to complete one level of Maslow’s hierarchy before moving to the next?
No. In his original 1943 paper, Abraham Maslow wrote that the order of needs is not nearly as rigid as it might seem, and that most people are only partly satisfied at every level at the same time. He illustrated this with made-up percentages, clearly labeled as arbitrary, rather than measured data.
When did Maslow write about self-transcendence?
Abraham Maslow wrote about transcendence in papers published in 1969 in the Journal of Transpersonal Psychology. These writings were collected in the book The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, published in 1971, the year after Maslow died.
