Can luxury empower you to self-actualize?
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Can luxury empower you to self-actualize?
From Joia’s daily walk
“One way to think of self-actualization is closing the gap between what you value and how you show up” — Alexi Robichaux
How did you show up in alignment with your values today? This is one of my favorite questions to ask each day, one I reference against my Top 5 core values (see yesterday’s Rapid Excellence Exercise).
Today, I’ve been reflecting on how living in accordance with one’s unique set of core values is living a life that’s self-actualizing.
One of my favorite books of the past few years is “Transcend: The New Science of Self-Actualization“ by Scott Barry Kaufman, an in-depth examination of the work of Abraham Maslow with fresh insights integrating new research and the latest ideas from the fields of psychology and neuroscience.
What is self-actualization?
According to SBK:
“Maslow defined [self actualization] as becoming all that you could possibly become, the best aspects of yourself fully developed…..He said, a person must do what they can do—an artist must paint, a poet must write poetry. We have these potentialities within us that we can feel deep inside and that would offer so much benefit to ourselves and to the world. Self-actualization is bringing those potential realities to as full expression as possible.” -Scott Barry Kaufman in conversation with Evan Nesterak, BehavioralScientist.org
This goes beyond “climbing a pyramid” which, incidentally, was a model Maslow himself never used. (According to SBK’s research: “He made it quite clear that we are always going back and forth in the hierarchy, and we can target multiple needs at the same time..”…Apparently the pyramid was developed and propagated by management textbooks and is not a very accurate representation of Maslow’s thinking).
SBK has proposed an updated model to more accurately capture Maslow’s views on human development and the core needs of security and growth: a sailboat.
This sailboat model, I argue, also has implications for the luxury sector, particularly for us high-end, premium, and luxury entrepreneurs who are creating the luxury of today and tomorrow.
We ought to be building the sail.
If business / entrepreneurship in essence is value creation, there are fundamentally two ways to go about it: either fix a problem or deliver a dream. Either target a need or target a desire. Or in Maslow/SBK’s framework: either create security (the hull) or create growth (the sail).
Luxury has always been about the latter. With insights from Maslow and the new science of self-actualization, we can do it even better. We can create excellence that empowers ourselves and others to be self-actualizing.
Sail on,
-Joia
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