With Purpose Success, part 30

From there you advance to esteem, and here you seek self-respect, including such feelings as confidence, competence, achievement, mastery, independence, and freedom. Finally, you advance to the top of the pyramid-self-actualization, which is truly knowing yourself. The idea is that if you've lived long enough and had enough chance to reflect, enough learning, and enough development in your life, then you become truly in touch with yourself, familiar with yourself, and achieve a level of integrity and connection and alignment with who you truly are.
And that's it. Maslow's view, which still dominates thinking in the free world, argues that we should all aim our rockets at the ultimate prize of being self-actualized; the reason you went to college and then to work and developed your relationships has been to feel a sense of deep comfort with who you are and your feelings and your aspirations.
Well, at the risk of seeming disrespectful to a man whose work I greatly admire (and whose ideas have certainly shaped my own journey),
I think Maslow didn't go far enough. It's fine to transcend physical needs and move up through health, friendship, and self-esteem to self-awareness and understanding. Yet that model largely aggrandizes a self-focused mind-set and lifestyle. It might be fine if you're going to live fifty or sixty years and need almost all of that time to reach a final awareness of who you are. But longevity has changed the game. More is demanded of us if we're going to live into our nineties.
I've come to believe there are elements of psychological development where you go beyond self-awareness and are primed and driven to leave a legacy by sharing your skills, wisdom, and resources with those who are less fortunate. Seen from this perspective interdependence might be a higher level of aspiration than independence. So I would add a sixth rung to the top of Maslow's hierarchy, and call it legacy. At this level, rather than retreat and retire, you go beyond self-actualization to a state of rich engagement where you take the best of who you are and the best of what you've cultivated over your life, and bring about meaningful involvement in activities and pursuits that light up the sky for others-as well as for yourself. It's about being involved with people and situations where you can make a difference and reap the satisfactions that derive from those kinds of self-transcendent connections.
Self-actualization is far too oriented toward self-satisfaction; engagement is about going beyond that to generosity and giving back-to living and leaving a legacy. It's about moving from success to significance, and
I'm convinced that this idea resonates with people at a very deep level, even as it hints at a new model of psychological development in which the top of the pyramid is not me-but we.
German philosopher Erich Fromm said, "Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence, as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness."