Starting with a song “Lemon Tree,” we began an instructive lesson. We were asked to have a group discussion on Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs and decide which need is the most important.

    It is a Theory of Human Motivation. We needed to guess and put the right order of the following six needs from the lowest to the highest:

    A. physiological; B. safety needs; C. love/belonging; D. self-actualization; E. esteem; F. self-transcendence. I wasn’t really good at this, but at last I figured it out: physiological needs; safety needs; love and belonging; esteem; self-actualization and self-transcendence.

    Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs is shaped like a pyramid. We put physiological at the bottom of the pyramid while self-actualization at the top. Indeed, Maslow used the terms “physiological,” “safety,” “belongingness and love,” “esteem,” “self-actualization” to describe the pattern that human motivation generally moves through.

    And we concluded that if a person lacks food, they will have a strong desire for food, and the other things wouldn’t be that important. In this case, all his energy would be used to find food to eat. In this situation, the most important thing becomes eating.

    Only when people are satisfied with physiological needs, more advanced, social needs appear. The highest need is self-transcendence based on self-actualization which is the most important. Only those who want to do something for others and have ambitions have this need. Those people are great and we should learn from them.