On Abraham Maslow's Theory of self-actualization

Are you aware of Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs?

Of course you are.  Who isn’t?  It’s been the most used  - or I should say over used – concept of man actualisation and human motivation theory.  Every time some, so called, expert consultant wants to look intelligent in his/her presentation, he/she serves us this theory once again.  So I won’t waste time explaining it to you.

What I am interested in and what has taken up some of my brain CPU lately is the tiny upper part of Maslow pyramid: the self-actualization.

What is it?

Well I guess there must be one answer to that question for every human being on the planet.  So seek your own.

The true question is.  How do we tap on it?  How do we access it?

Now I see that several ones would raise their hands and gladly say in front of the class that in order to get to that higher stage, one must fulfil the underlying needs right?

Beeeeeep!

WRONG!

There are many examples of people who had nothing, they could barely eat and yet they devoted their lives to others, defended causes and felt a strong feeling of fulfilment.  Insert the name of your choice here.

Maslow studied the characteristics of people that arrived at a state of self-actualization.  Those are the people who have been able to exploit their potentials to the maximum.  No need to become Buddhist or holistic here.  If you want to you can. But self-actualization does not require it as a must have.  Just seek to use your potential at the maximum.

How do you know if you use your potential to the maximum?  Do it.  If you do it well then seek higher challenges.  The idea is to test you limits.  When you get to your limits, you’ll know it.  You are either going to feel that this is becoming too big a task for you.  Or you’ll screw up.  Or you’ll have this feeling that you just and plainly want to shit your pants right now.  But fear not!  This is all part of the process.  Indulge yourself. Learn from it.  And adapt.  Try different angles, other approached.  Know the difference between a setback and an actual limitation of yourself.  The more you’ll do, the more you’ll know what you can and cannot do.  In short, thrive to get to your level of incompetency in what you choose to do.  Yes!  You’ve guested it, it’s the Peter Principle that you can apply to every aspect of your life and not only as en employee.

And when you’ve reached the end of that road does it means that everything must come to a stop?  No. Its not because you are not good at something that you cannot associate with someone who is good at it… an continue on your path by the same way.

Back to Maslow.

Maslow started his research originally.  He chooses historical eminent people that he considered people who achieved self-actualization.   Those were men and women that made an exceptional use of their potentiality.  Among them were Spinoza, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, WilliamJames, Jane Addams, Albert Einstein and Eleanor Roosevelt.

After scrutinizing their lives, Maslow developed a “robot portrait” of an individual that realizes his/her potentialities which brings to self-actualization.  He also developed a list of behaviors that, as per Maslow, can bring one on to the road of self-actualization.  Here they are as per Maslow:

Characteristics of those that reach self-actualization

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•         They have an adequate perception of reality and they are capable to support uncertainty.
•          They accept themselves as they are and they accept other as they are too.
•     They show spontaneity in their actions and their thoughts.
•     They are focus on problems instead of being focus on themselves.
•     They have a good sense of humor.
•     They are very creative people.
•     They resist social pressures of standardization and conformity.  But they are not overtly rebels.
•     They engage into the wellbeing of humanity.
•     They are able to profoundly appreciate the essential experiences of life.
•     They entertain profound and fulfilling relationships with few people instead of amassing tons of friends
•     They are capable of appreciating life with an objective view point

Conduct, behaviours leading to self-actualization

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•     Discover life like children are.  With total concentration and awe.
•     Try something new instead of resting in the security of what is known
•     Listen to your feeling for what they are and what they mean in the evaluation of experiences instead of surrendering to tradition, religion, authority or the majority
•     Be honest.  With yourself and others.  Don’t play games.
•     Accept being unpopular when your point of view does not coincide with the vie of others
•     Take responsibilities
•     Work hard at what YOU chose to do.
•     Try to identify the schemes and mechanisms behind which we take shelter and once aware of them, have the courage to let them go

To me, I see some similarities between Maslow’s theory of self-actualization and the concept of the Übermensch from Friedrich Nietzsche.

More on that in another post J

As a ending note.  I will leave you with this interesting link of Philosopher’s Notes that will tell you a little more about the philosophy of Maslow.

Enjoy. 

Comment on "In praise of Enemies"

Vincent Mancini: [in the helicopter] I'd like to take Joey Zasa up in one of these and drop him. 
Michael Corleone: Joey Zasa is nothing. He's a small-time enforcer. He bluffs, threats, but nothing. You can see him coming a mile away. 
Vincent Mancini: We should kill him before he kills... 
Michael Corleone: No! Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment. 


I don't read much blogs.  I don't have much time.  But one of the three that I read every day is sebastianmarshall.comhttp://www.sebastianmarshall.com/

One of his latest very inspiring post is "In praise of Enemies".

This is very inspiring and I recommend its reading to any ones.  But don't just read it.  Meditate on it.  And then act on it.  I surely started.  There is people in your life it seems that you are often the one that has to deploy energy to maintain their relationship.  If you don't call, if you don't invite them... they vanish.  I got rid of those.

There is people that you know but are not actual friends... I got rid of them.

And then there is those friends.  Normally you can count them on one hand only.  Those that even if you are too busy to call them or see them.  You know that when you are going to see them again, you will take it where you left it.  Those I kept.

Having made a cleanup of my friend, let’s focus on the enemies now.  They are few but they are strong.  In the past I didn't paid much attention to them.  I was despising them, paying very few attention to them.

That was my mistake.  Because they didn’t.  They were very active in my back and took advantage of leniency.  They added ground over me.  And while my friend (the ones that I taught were friends) didn’t pay much attention to me if there were not much for them in there, in the meantime my enemies were paying acute attention to me.

My bad.  Mea Culpa.

I was blind but now I see.

I will pay much more attention to my enemies now that my “friend’s cleanup” is done.  Because the energy I was deploying into lame friendship will now be reallocated into deceiving my enemies.

Thanks to Sebastian.  If I ever go to Asia one day I’d like to shake hands with him.

Case Study – Karelle

Karelle is the sister of my friend Eric. I lost her sight something like 20 years ago. And my friend does not talk to me about her much. She is a very beautiful smart woman. And she`s redhead so she’s got all my attention. J

I knew she divorced a few years ago ans she went on living her new life with her girlfriend. And that is all I knew about her.

Last week my friend gave me some new information about her. And this triggered me to ask him to meet her.

She is living happily with her girlfriend. I knew she was working at some government job when she was married. She quitted that job several years ago. And now…

… she is living up my dream financial set up.

She depends on no one (no corporate or government job) for her financial subsistance. She runs several laundry in the city. She collects money from the laundering machines several times a week. She also have a web site on which she sells goods to the gays and lesbians community. And she is looking forward to develop a third source of income which will be software oriented.

She understood! Wait for no one to get your money and ensure your subsistance. Never put yourself (like I did) into a corporate slavery life that combines mid paycheck and huge debts so you’re stuck there. Multiply your sources of income so if one dries up or slows down, the others cover. And use the most part of your time doing what is worth: not going up the corporate ladder, but what is interesting you most. Painting, whriting, travelling, learning new languages, taking care of the ones you love, etc..

Way to go Karelle!

Sure way (if that exists) to maintain your employability

There is been hundreds of thousands of articles written about the corporate world and who jobs are unsecure nowadays and that one must maintain a high level of productivity and compete against one another in order to keep our job.

That is if you want to lose your energy fighting shoulder to shoulder against the others thousands who does the same work as you.  Instead, why don`t you apply a whole new strategy.  Let’s borrow the concept of niche from marketing and apply it to your work.

Create your niche.

What does that mean?

I`ll give you an example.  In my company I realized that most people are computer illiterate.  And they do most of their work by hand like they used to for 20 years.  Of course they use emails to communicate and all.  But basically what they do is reproduce some patterns over and over again.  Either on some computer screens or with good old paper.

What I did, I used my computer skills to automate some, and in some cases, whole of the work the people used to.  And since not much people are knowledgeable of coding, I’m the only one in my department that can change, improve, modify, maintain, the tools they are now using.

I created my niche.  Sure they could fire me tomorrow morning.  Of course they can replace me.  But it would bring them about 1 year behind from where they are today.  So they keep me.

Find out what you are good at in your work.  Something people always come to you for.  Develop is as a specialty.  Bring it to such a level, that if anyone would want to compete you, they would have to put enormous amount of time to play catch up.

The evolution of co-operation – Make or Break?

Social networking tames cheats

How people collaborate, in the face of numerous temptations to cheat, is an important field of psychological and economic research.  A lot of this research focuses on the “tit-for-tat” theory of co-operation : that humans are disposed, when dealing with another person, to behave in a generous manner until that other person shows himself not to be generous.  At this point co-operation is withdrawn.  Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me twice, shame on me.

When he encounters such a withdrawal of collaboration, the theory goes, the malefactor will learn the error of his ways and become a more co-operative individual.  And there is experimental evidence, based on specially designed games, that tit-for-tat does work for pairs of people.  Human societies, though, are more complex than mere dyads.  And until recently, it has been difficult to model that complexity in the laboratory.  But a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by Nicholas Christakis and his colleagues at Harvard has changed that.  Dr Christakis arranged for a collaboration-testing game to be played over the web, with many participants.  As a result, he and his team have gained a more sophisticated insight into the way co-operation develops.

Dr Christakis used what is known as a public-goods game for his experiment.  At the beginning of such a game, points are doled out of each participant.  During every round, players are given the opportunity to donate points to their neighbours.  Points so donated are augmented by an equal number from the masters of the game.  If everyone co-operates, then, every one ends up richer.  A “defector” who refuses to donate to his co-operating neighbours will, however, benefit at the expense of those neighbours.  At the game’s end, the points are converted into real money, to ensure that the proper incentive are in place.

To play his large-scale public-goods game, Dr Christakis recruited 785 volunteers via Mechanical Turk - a service provided by Amazon, an online retailer, that works by farming out small tasks to an army of individual workers.  Together, they played repeated rounds of one of three variations of the game.

In the first, participants always interacted with the same group of people.  In the second, the connections were randomly reshuffled after each round.  In the final version, one-third of the possible pairings between participants were chosen at random after each round (such pairs may or may not, therefore, have been dealing with each other in the previous round).  One player from each pair was first told or reminded of how the other had behhaved in the previous round, and was then asked whether he wanted to break his connection with that partner, if he already had one, of form a new connection, if he had not.

In all versions of the game,roughly 60% of players started out co-operating.  However, in the the first two, this decreased over time as the pernicious influence of the freeloaders spread.  The larger the fraction of a subject's partners who defected in a given round, the less likely that person was to co-operate in the next - classical tit-for-tat.  However, this tit-for-tat retaliation was not enough to save co-operation, and aftera dozen rounds only 10%-20% of the players were still willing to co-operate.

In the variant where participants had some choice over whom they interacted with, though, the amount of co-operation stayed stable as the rounds progressed.  When Dr Christakis and his team looked at how the relationships between players were evolving in this third version, they found that connections between two co-operators were much more likely to be maintained than links that involved a defector.  Over time, the co-operators accumulated more social connections than the defectors did.

Furthermore, as they were shunned, the defectors began to change their behavior.  A defector's likelihood of switching to co-operation increased with the number of players who had broken links with him in the previous round.  Unlike straightforward tit-for-tat, social retaliation was having a marked effect.

The next question, then, is whether such mechanism holds outside the laboratory.  To find out, Dr Christakis has forged links with some anthropologists.  They hope to report the answer soon.

Source: The Economist.

My training in 2012

I've been training no for a few years and I've got quite a good result for the chest and arms.  But what remain... how should I say... "disgracious" on my body is my belly.  This is what ruins everything else.

So this year I will focus on my belly.  Getting abs of steels!  That is the name of the game this year.  While I won't neglect the other body parts, I will focus on the abs this year. 

I will apply the 80/20 rule on my body.  I will work on 20% of my body that will deliver 80% of my look change result.

I will follow the 300 Spartan workout.

And I will take a picture of my progress every week and post it here to keep me motivated and committed.

This is my training schedule:

Beginning on Monday January 9: Week 1.

Monday: abs (300 Spartan workout)

Tuesday: cardio

Wednesday: abs (300 Spartan workout)

Thursday: cardo

Friday: abs (300 Spartan workout)

Saturday: off

Sunday: off

For now, no weight training yet.  This will come in a few weeks.

Combined with my training I will atch my diet.  Nothing too arsh.  I already eat well.  Except for the portions that will have to downsize and my occasional craving to the fat food.  I will have to refrain on that.

Link of the week and book review

I just finished reading "The ascent of money: Financial history of the world" by Niall Ferguson.  This is a very good book if you want to know why money is money and hy it has become what it is today. It also gives good advices of you want to make some... and keep it.

After reading this book the financial world will appear in much more perspective to you and you'll understand that the world has always lived financial crisis and the govnement have always salvaged its protagonists.  Therefore the subprime crisis of 2008 is no special on kind nor in scale of what ever happened before.  It is just that us humans we have a very short memory.  And we have a tendancy to think that or time is better or worst than anyone else.

But it also brings this view:  That crisis are not so rare.  And that it is never the end of the world as we know it and the markets always finish by recovering.  Then one who is patient... and liquid during such crisis can take advantage of it and make a whole lot of money.

Strategically speaking this is brilliant.  Just wait for people to crash and burn in panic.  And when they're at the bottom.  You buy.

But I made a nice discovery today.  If you are of the kind that is interested in money, the economy and all.  But not really attracted in reading such a book... Rejoice!  For the entire Niall Ferguson's book has been made as a four hours documentary hosted by Niall Ferguson himself.  Very good watch I recommand it.  I recommand both.  Read it first then solidify your knowledge with the documentary.

Here is the link: The ascent of money.