As pilot of an airplane, Abraham Maslow would not have survived his first flight. Piloting is no job for a fountain of ideas, continually preoccupied, envisioning. Judge for yourself. He wrote in his journal:
All these beautiful ideas go into my files & get lost. I rarely go back to them because meanwhile too many new ideas have come. The insight about my place then became clearer - I’m the idea man. In a specialized world, if I did only that which I did best, this would be it, full time. No teaching, lecturing, not even writing up - just bare first-draft statements of the ideas, one after another, to be worked up by others. I could use then a whole staff of secretaries & of research assistants & of writers. If I had all the money I could wish, this is what I would wish: to be away from the world more of the time (coming back into it only at my pleasure, when I was fallow, or finished or tired, with no job, no responsibilities, no telephone, no dates, no time, no calendar, no friends). And then be like a queen bee turning out thousands of egg-ideas that others would nurture & bring to maturity.
(Quoted from Abraham Maslow’s entry of July 2, 1961, The Journals of A. H. Maslow, Richard Lowry, ed. Brooks/Cole Publishing Co. 1979.) Once, on sabbatical, we Sauntered through The Journals’ 1329 pages, a well spent preliminary to writing our book, The Life of the Creative Spirit.
For a brief biography of Abraham Maslow, click here. For images of and related to Abraham Maslow, click here. For an explanation of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, click here.
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