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One of the most legendary ideas in the history of psychology
心理学史上最具传奇色彩的观点之一，
is located in an unassuming triangle divided into five sections
是基于一个不起眼的三角形，这个三角形分为五个部分，
referred to universally simply as 'Maslow's Pyramid of Needs'.
它就是广为人知的“马斯洛需求金字塔”。
This profoundly influential pyramid first saw the world in an academic journal in the United States in 1943,
1943年在美国的一份学术期刊上,这个影响深远的金字塔被首次提出，
where it was crudely drawn in black and white and surrounded by dense and jargon-rich text.
彼时，它仅有黑白两色，绘制粗糙，周围是的密密麻麻的学术文本。
It has since become a mainstay of psychological analyses, business presentations and TED Talks–
自此，它成为了心理分析、商业演讲和TED演讲的主流理论，
and grown ever more colourful and emphatic in the process.
并在这个过程中被进一步丰富和强调。
The pyramid was the work of a thirty-five year old Jewish psychologist of Russian origins called Abraham Maslow,
“马斯洛需求金字塔”是35岁的俄国裔犹太心理学家亚伯拉罕·马斯洛的杰作，
who had been looking, since the start of his professional career, for nothing less than the meaning of life.
从开启职业生涯后，他就一直在寻找生命的意义。
No longer part of the close-knit orthodox family of his youth,
当他不再从属于年轻时所处的连结紧密的传统家庭时，
Maslow wanted to find out what could make life purposeful for people (himself included) in modern-day America,
马斯洛想探寻现代美国人(也包括他自己)生活的意义，
a country where the pursuit of money and fame seemed to have eclipsed any more interior or authentic aspirations.
在这个国家，对金钱和名誉的追求似乎盖过了任何内在的或真实的渴望。
He saw psychology as the discipline that would enable him to answer the yearnings and questions that people had once taken to religion.
他认为从心理学这门学科中，他能够找到人们为何对宗教产生热忱和疑惑的答案。
He suddenly saw that human beings could be said to have essentially five different kinds of need:
他突然发现，人类从本质上有五种不同的需求:
on the one hand, the psychological or what one could term, without any mysticism being meant by the word, the spiritual
一方面，是心理需求，或者说我们可以称之为，不带任何神秘主义色彩的，精神层面的需求；
and on the other, the material. For Maslow, we all start with a set of utterly non-negotiable and basic physiological needs,
另一方面，则是物质需求。在马斯洛看来，我们的物质需求都是源于一系列不可妥协的基本生理需求。
for food, water, warmth and rest.
比如，对食物、水、温暖和休息的需求。
In addition, we have urgent safety needs for bodily security and protection from attack.
此外，我们还有迫切的安全需求，我们需要人身安全得到保障，不受到袭击。
But then we start to enter the spiritual domain.
然后我们开始进入精神领域。
We need belongingness and love. We need friends and lovers, we need esteem and respect.
我们需要归属感和爱。我们需要朋友和爱人，我们需要尊敬和重视。
And lastly, and most grandly, we are driven by what Maslow called – in a now legendary term – an urge for self-actualization:
最后，也是最伟大的一点，我们是被自我实现的冲动（马斯洛创造的传奇术语）所驱动的:
a vast, touchingly nebulous and yet hugely apt concept
这是一个宽泛、动人、模糊而又恰当的概念，
involving what Maslow described as 'living according to one's full potential' and 'becoming who we really are.'
这个概念包括马斯洛所说的“发挥出个人的全部潜力”和“成为真正的自己”。
Part of the reason why the description of these needs, laid out in pyramid-form, has proved so persuasive is their capacity to capture, with elemental simplicity, a profound structural truth about human existence.
这些需求的说法如此具有说服力的原因之一，是它使用最简洁的要素描述出了关于人类存在深刻的结构性真理。
Maslow was putting his finger, with unusual deftness and precision, on a set of answers to very large questions that tend to confuse and perplex us viciously, particularly when we are young,
马斯洛以异乎寻常的敏锐和精确，从困惑我们已久（尤其是在年轻时）的庞大问题和找寻它的答案入手，
namely: What are we really after? What do we long for?
即:我们真正追求的是什么?我们渴望什么?
And how do we arrange our priorities and give due regard for the different and competing claims we have on our attention?
我们如何安排我们的优先事项，并合理考虑的存在竞争关系的不同需求?
Maslow was reminding us with artistic concision of the shape of an ideal well-lived life,
马斯洛以艺术的简洁来塑造出一个美好生活的理想模式，
proposing at once that we cannot live by our spiritual callings alone, but also that it cannot be right to remain focused only on the material either.
我们不能只听从精神的召唤，也不能只专注于物质。
We need, to be whole, both the material and the spiritual realms to be attended to,
我们需要将它们看做一个整体，同时关注物质和精神领域，
the base lending support while the summit offers upward direction and definition.
基本需求提供支撑，而上层需求则提供方向和决策。
Maslow was rebutting calls from two kinds of zealots:
马斯洛反驳了两种狂热分子的言论：
firstly, over-ardent spiritual types who might urge us to forget entirely about money, housing, a good insurance policy and enough to pay for lunch.
首先，过度狂热的精神追求可能会敦促我们完全忘记金钱、住房、好的保险政策和足够的午餐。
But he was also fighting against extreme hard-nosed pragmatists who might imply that life was simply a brute process of putting food on the table and going to the office.
他也反对极端务实的实用主义者，这些人可能只是将生活视为一个把食物放在桌子上，去办公室工作的纯粹流程。
Both camps had – for Maslow – misunderstood the complexity of the human animal.
对于马斯洛来说，这两个阵营都误解了人类这种动物的复杂性。
Unlike other creatures, we truly are multifaceted, called at once to unfurl our soul according to its inner destiny – and to make sure we can pay the bills at the end of the month.
与其他生物不同的是，我们确实是多面性的，我们回应内心命运的召唤去实现我们的灵魂追求——同时我们还要确保月底能够付上账单。
Operating at the heyday of American capitalism, Maslow was interestingly ambivalent about business.
有有趣的是，在美国资本主义的全盛时期，马斯洛对商业的态度是矛盾的。
He was awed by the material resources of large corporations around him but at the same time he lamented that almost all their economic activity was – unfairly and bizarrely –
他对周围大企业的物质资源感到敬畏，但同时他又哀叹，这些企业几乎所有的经济活动都是——不公正和奇怪的——
focused on honouring customers' needs at the bottom of his pyramid.
它们只专注于满足顾客金字塔底层的需求。
America's largest companies were helping people to have a roof of their heads, feeding them, moving them around and ensuring they could talk to each other long-distance.
美国最大的几家公司正在帮助人们，让他们有个栖身之所，给他们提供食物，让他们可以四处走动，并确保他们能够远距离交谈。
But they seemed utterly uninterested in trying to fulfill the essential spiritual appetites defined on the higher slopes of his pyramid.
但他们似乎并不在意满足人们金字塔更高层的基本精神需求。
Towards the end of his long life, Maslow expressed a hope that businesses could in time learn to make more of their profits from addressing not only our basic needs but also – and as importantly –
在他漫长的生命即将结束时，马斯洛表示，他希望企业能够及时学会不仅仅通过满足顾客的基本需求来获取利润，而更重要的是——
our higher spiritual and psychological ones as well. That would be truly enlightened capitalism.
重视更高层面的精神和心理需求。这才是真正开明的资本主义。
In the personal sphere, Maslow's pyramid remains a hugely useful object to turn to whenever we are trying to assess the direction of our lives.
在个人领域，马斯洛金字塔仍然是一个非常有用的对象，当我们试图评估我们的生活方向时，
Often, as we reflect upon it, we start to notice that we really haven't arranged and balanced our needs as wisely and elegantly as we might.
通常，当我们反思自己的方向时，我们可能发现我们并未如自己料想地那般明智妥善地安排和平衡我们的需求。
Some lives have got an implausibly wide base: all the energy seems directed towards material accumulation.
有些人的生活被大块的物质需求所占据，这些人所有的能量似乎都流向了物质积累。
At the same time, there are lives with the opposite problem, where we have not paid due head to our need to look after our fragile and vulnerable bodies.
与此同时，也有一些人面临着相反的问题，他们对自己脆弱的身体似乎没有投入足够的关注。
Maslow was pointing us to the need for a greater balance between the many priorities we must juggle.
马斯洛指出，我们需要在我们必须兼顾的许多优先事项之间取得更大的平衡。
His beautifully simple visual cue is, above anything else, a portrait of a life lived in harmony with the complexities of our nature.
他提出了一个简单却适用的观点，即最重要的应该是，找到一种能够与我们复杂的天性和谐共处的共处的生活方式。
We should, at our less frantic moments, use it to reflect with newfound focus on what it is we might do next.
我们应该在自己相对冷静的时刻，借助需求金字塔来反思我们目前最关注的需求，来确定未来的方向。
