Human Motivation: Needs, Potential, and Fulfillment
Broad Framework of Human Motivation
Humans are motivated by needs that are not formed from a gap, but rather from another statement of reasons: potential. Human existence involves not only lack but also potential.
Distinction Between Deprivation and Potential as Early Motivation
Deprivation is the lack of something a person needs either physiologically (body level) or psychologically (intimate level).
Potential is an internal force for growth through the deployment of consciousness that can achieve personal development (to oneself).
The two general needs of humans are the general need to repair deficiencies and the general need to display potential. These are expressed through deficiency needs and through goal needs.
Deficiency needs and meta needs are integrated by specific needs.
Motivation From This Distinction
Simple motivation is the lower level of our motivation in which we place the needs of deficiency.
Goal motivation is the top level of it in the goal that we put the needs.
There is a hierarchical superiority of plant needs to the needs of deficiency.
Goal needs are higher in the order of reasons that stem from a higher principle and that drive to find a goal also higher.
The coexistence of two tendencies in humans: the tendency to sufficiency and the tendency to perfection.
As human motivation has two overall goals—sufficiency and perfection—humans, from the standpoint of motivation, also have two trends, one towards each goal.
Forms of Positivity: Simple Positivity and Positive Goal
The two goals of human motivation, adequacy and perfection, have in common the fact that they are positive life events and, therefore, gratifying to the person.
Sufficiency is a state of satisfaction that is achieved when repairing a given deficiency.
Perfection is the state of fullness which is achieved by displaying one’s potential to the maximum.
Fullness and satisfaction are the perfection and sufficiency are the forms of positive life: the first is the positive goal, while the second is simple positivity.
Forms of Negativity
Human life has two negative situations contrary to the positive situations mentioned:
Deficiency is defined as the deprivation suffered by a person for having an unrepaired lack.
Irrealization is defined as a situation of lack of self-development that a human being has to have power without deploying.
The Process of Human Development and the Role Played Within it for the Two Kinds of Needs
Life Events Scale:
- Positive goal life situation (Perfection – Fullness) Meta positivity
- Positive living situation (Sufficiency – Satisfaction) Simple positive
- Negative life situation (Deficiency – Withdrawal) Negativity
The full development of human beings, according to Maslow, is a process from failure to perfection and not just adequacy.
Deficiency needs and meta needs are involved throughout this process at two different times. Deficiency needs motivate to overcome the deficiency, which is negative, and sufficiency, which is positive. Goal needs motivate to overcome sufficiency, which is purely positive, and achieve perfection, which is a positive goal.
The Characteristics of Fullness as Meta-Positivity
Fullness has three characteristics that belong to being a positive goal and that set it apart from satisfaction. The first is that to achieve it, it is essential to have reached another positive previously. The second is that when we dare to reach it, negativity is exceeded in its two forms and not a single one. The third is that while temporary satisfaction repairs the gap, but does not place the person in another state beyond this, the fullness itself puts them in that other state than the gap. (Satisfaction and deprivation are consistent, but lack and fullness are antithetical).
Peak Experiences
Finding uses psychological reality, these experiences are intense episodes within the human self, but not all people who made the author come to be and consist of ecstatic moments of life are accompanied by a sense of gratification and a total feeling of perfection.
Positivity Wholeness as a Defined Above-Deficiency State of Life
Beyond the state of life that defines the gap, there is another state of life defined by fullness.
Both iron deficiency and sufficiency are situations that occur in the first state. However, perfection is a situation that occurs in the second state.
The person who carries out a comprehensive development process that goes first to the second deficiency state is in a supra-deficiency state.
Interpretation of the Significance of Meta-Needs as Needs
The two tendencies of human beings, the tendency to sufficiency and the tendency to perfection, are growth trends, but the former is not transcendent, while the second is because humans do not tend to overcome the natural state of deprivation.
As the trend to perfection is a transcendent trend and comes from the meta requirements, these can be interpreted as transcendence needs.