Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die

by Chip Heath

You may remember this list as Maslow’s Pyramid, or Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs. Maslow’s list of needs was incredibly insightful, but he was wrong to describe it as a “hierarchy.” Maslow saw the hierarchy as a ladder—to be climbed rung by rung from the bottom up. You couldn’t fill your longing for Esteem until you satisfied your longing for Security. You couldn’t fill your Aesthetic needs until your Physical needs were taken care of. (In Maslow’s world, there were no starving artists.) Subsequent research suggests that the hierarchical aspect of Maslow’s theory is bogus—people pursue all of these needs pretty much simultaneously. There’s no question that most starving men would rather eat than transcend, but there’s an awful lot of overlap in the middle.