While listening to a conversation on living “a good life,” I was introduced to the concept of Maslow’s Sailboat – a new way to look at the “needs” Maslow outlined as necessary to live a full life. Chances are you’re familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs – you likely learned about it in an Intro to Psych course like me, or have at least seen it somewhere on the internet. It depicts humans as motivated by increasing higher “levels” of needs, with health/safety/etc at the bottom up to self-actualization at the top.
Maslow never actually created a pyramid of needs – that graphic is a gamified version probably from some modern firm looking to sell an image, and it gives the impression that life is some video game where you move from one level to the next. Instead, Maslow emphasized that human maturation is an ongoing process rather than steps up some pyramid.
Introducing the sailboat metaphor – with the security needs in the hull and growth as the sails. The idea is that when you feel secure enough, you drop the sails and pursue growth. When we have our security needs achieved, the sailboat takes us to explore the world and people around us, growing on the way. And just like a boat, a wave could always come crashing down and boring holes into your hull, stopping your progress.
Without getting too deep into it, I just take it as an interesting idea to consider for our own lives. What holes are riddling our hulls, keeping us from moving forwards? And if there are such holes, maybe it would be critical to get those patched up to keep moving and growing.
For more on this as well as other related topics – check out Scott Barry Kaufman, psychologist and author of Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization. Here’s a bit of what he had to say about this topic:
“Life isn’t a trek up a summit but a journey to travel through—a vast blue ocean, full of new opportunities for meaning and discovery but also danger and uncertainty … what is needed is something a bit more functional. We’ll need a sailboat.”