Name: Motivation and personality
ISBN: 9780060419875

Motivation and personality

This is an article written by David Sze that I've found on The Huffington Post Abraham Maslow is the leading figure in the tradition of humanistic psychology and the modern Positive Psychology movement owes a huge debt to his theories. His ‘Hierarchy of Needs’ remains widely recognized and used. Nonetheless, the layperson knows surprisingly little about the pinnacle Maslow wants us to aspire to- Self-Actualization. Who is this Self-Actualized person, and what characteristics does s/he have? Maslow’s portrait is detailed and complex. Self-Actualization Maslow describes the good life as one directed towards self-actualization, the pinnacle need. Self-actualization occurs when you maximize your potential, doing the best that you are capable of doing. Maslow studied individuals whom he believed to be self-actualized, including Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson, and Albert Einstein, to derive the common characteristics of the self-actualized person. Here are a selection of the most important characteristics, from his book Motivation and Personality: 1) Self-actualized people embrace the unknown and the ambiguous. They are not threatened or afraid of it; instead, they accept it, are comfortable with it and are often attracted by it. They do not cling to the familiar. Maslow quotes Einstein: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.” 2) They accept themselves, together with all their flaws.

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kashyapcApr 2022

Indeed, Maslow never drew anything like that. The psychologist Scott Bary Kaufman debunks this myth more thoroughly in his 2019 write-up here[1]. (Aside: Kaufman updates Maslow's "hierarchy" idea with a "sailboat" metaphor[2].)

Maslow always emphasized the relative satisfaction of needs. To quote from his famous paper[3]:

[quote]

... As for the concept of emergence of a new need after satisfaction of the prepotent [i.e. dominant] need, this emergence is not a sudden, saltatory phenomenon but rather a gradual emergence by slow degrees from nothingness. For instance, if prepotent need A is satisfied only 10 per cent then need B may not be visible at all. However, as this need A becomes satisfied 25 per cent, need B may emerge 5 per cent, as need A becomes satisfied 75 per cent need B may emerge 90 per cent, and so on.

[/quote]

If you want to understand Maslow, there's no escaping his two seminal books:

• Motivation and Personality, 1954

• Toward a Psychology of Being, 1962

He writes with superb clarity, and is an absolute joy to read. If you're really, really short on time, at least read his paper, A Theory of Human Motivation[3].

[1] https://scottbarrykaufman.com/who-created-maslows-iconic-pyr...

[2] https://scottbarrykaufman.com/sailboat-metaphor/

[3] http://worrydream.com/refs/Maslow%20-%20A%20Theory%20of%20Hu...

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fstopmickOct 2019

I can try; I have yet to nail down a concise articulation of these, but here's my swing at it:

collectiveOwnership() would describe the process of the product gradually going from a dictatorship (I am the one who controls the code and direction) to democracy (all participants control the code and direction) as the community guidelines, culture, automated moderation, human moderation, and technical details of decentralized ownership are ironed out. This way we protect ourselves against any minority of stakeholders from having the power to pull a Cambridge Analytica and sell out the users and their data, or allow advertisers to dictate what's acceptable and subject LGBTQ+ creators to accidental censorship a la YouTube. If we can recursively create organizations that follow this model, I'm hopeful that people will gradually begin to expect and demand socially sustainable business models to drive the products that they use.

selfActualize() would describe the process of becoming all that we can be, which is the focus of Abraham Maslow's Motivation and Personality. Carl Rogers and Kurt Goldstein also covered it, but I think Maslow's take is the most thought-provoking. If you want some notes on his work, I'd be happy to share (they're linked in the post I shared here). Here's a wiki on it for a concise take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-actualization

Sticking that at the end of the main() method was my way of saying that I'll feel prepared to be selfish as soon as I've had some impact on the bigger picture.

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NotSuspiciousJun 2023

I am a bit envious of your apparent lack of akrasia. I read a similar argument to yours by Abraham Maslow ("Motivation and Personality" I believe?) and have the same reaction then as I do now. The inner worlds of different human beings can be radically different. Sometimes we forget that and assume our experiences or ways of experiencing are universal. Some people have aphantasia, others (more lucky perhaps) don't have akrasia or at the very least can sufficiently overcome it by bringing to mind whether or not one wants to do the task at-hand. Not all of us are so blessed, although all of us could probably benefit from weighing the costs and benefits of doing tasks that we believe need to be done but still have resistance to doing.

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mherdegApr 2022

Your guess is as good as mine here. This phrase appears in Wikipedia but the citation in the article only supports the stuff in the quotation marks, not the phrase "master race":

> Maslow studied what he called the master race of people such as Albert Einstein, Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Frederick Douglass rather than mentally ill or neurotic people, writing that "the study of crippled, stunted, immature, and unhealthy specimens can yield only a cripple psychology and a cripple philosophy."[11]: 236 > … > Maslow, A (1954). Motivation and personality. New York, NY: Harper. ISBN 978-0-06-041987-5.

I took a read through the text in question ( https://archive.org/details/motivationperson00masl_0 ) and while the quoted text seems to have been quoted accurately, the phrase "master race" doesn't appear in that book. What Maslow seems to be saying in that section (from an extremely quick skim) is that he is talking about the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, although he uses the phrase "healthy people" to refer to the people he's writing about.

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richardbrevigJun 2020

Please review Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs [1]. I'm just communicating what he said in his book Motivation and Personality. His theory is taught in every introduction to psychology textbook.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs

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