Anthony Robbins evangelized the six primal human needs as
- Certainty – the need for certainty of having food and shelter. This encompasses the physical needs that a human needs to survive.
- Variety – the need to change ones state of existence away from a state of restlessness.
- Significance – the need to feel special and recognized.
- Connection/Love – the need for interaction with other people. Depression is a symptom of the lack of 3 and 4.
- Growth – the need to grow with knowledge, experience, age, and wisdom. Everyone is either growing or dying. This is different from variety in that this is the spiritual need for positive change.
- Contribution – the need to give back to others, the satisfaction of feeling you’ve helped someone or you mean to something to someone else.
Anthony ordered these needs from physical to spiritual. As one slowly fulfill the physical needs, there is a greater desire for fulfillment. Interestingly, those living in poverty can still fulfill some of the spiritual needs without fulfilling the physical ones. This gives them the will to survive and grow. There is meaning in this ordering of needs, but it’s not a strict hierarchy.
Abraham Maslow has a different view of the fundamental human needs in which needs are arranged in a pyramid much like the food pyramid.
In Maslow’s model, the human needs are built bottom up from the physical basics to higher level needs of self-actualization(click on the image for a detailed view). This structure suggests that you must first satisfy the bottom layers before you can hope to achieve higher levels of fulfillment. This model is too pessimistic and have received a lot of criticism.
On the other hand, there is also the ontological view of human needs which says that there is no hierarchical structure to human needs. That’s not to say that each need can be independently fulfilled, far from it – they are interrelated and they overlap. It’s a much more complex structure than a hierarchy.
These needs are
- subsistence,
- protection,
- affection,
- understanding,
- participation,
- leisure,
- creation,
- identity and
- freedom.
One is truly happy if those needs are fulfilled.
From a structural point of view, each model has it’s advantages. A hierarchical structure allows you to focus your attention on a smaller set of needs. It eliminates the need for you to figure out your own priorities and allows you to easily set personal development goals. The down side is that the priority that Maslow’s model places on the bottom of the pyramid may make you loose focus on other areas of your life. Which is why I prefer the less rigidly structured model.
The ontological model (based on intrinsic human needs) gives you more freedom in choosing which needs to fulfill first, and which needs to fulfill in conjunction with another. The goal of life, then, ought to be to fulfill as many of these needs as you can. You’ll have to set your own priorities, but you are the best judge for your own life and can best identify what’s missing in your life. Although sometimes a friend might be able to do a better job, and if you just realized that you don’t have that friend, then you’ve also just found at least one thing missing in you’re life.
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