One of Maslow's quieter but most important observations: most behaviour is multi-motivated. When a person eats, they may be satisfying hunger — but also seeking comfort, or social connection over a shared meal, or a kind of control when everything else feels uncertain. When someone works obsessively, it may be partly about achievement, partly about safety, partly about belonging to a tribe of people who work like that. A single act, multiple needs. This matters because it means that if you only address one level of a need, the behaviour may persist — because the deeper one has not been touched. The person who craves constant validation is often not primarily seeking prestige. They may be seeking the assurance that they are loved. Prestige will not satisfy that. Only love will. Maslow was also honest about the limits of his own framework. The hierarchy is not rigid. Some creative people seem to skip levels — producing work of extraordinary quality even while basic needs go unmet. Some people genuinely prioritise esteem over love. The hierarchy describes a tendency in most people, not a universal law. He also pointed out that needs you have never lacked tend to feel unimportant. If you have never been truly hungry, food feels trivial. If you have always felt safe, safety feels like a given. This makes it easy to look at someone struggling at a lower level and misread what they need — because that level is invisible to you. The practical application of all of this: when you want to understand behaviour — your own or someone else's — the most useful question is not "what are they doing?" It is "what need is this in service of?" That question almost always leads somewhere more useful.