The Creator’s Hierarchy: Maslow Had It Upside Down

Maslow said creativity and self-actualization come after your basic needs are met.

But what if that’s backwards?

In this solo episode of The Stephan Hogan Podcast, I break down why Maslow’s hierarchy of needs does not fully work for creators, entrepreneurs, artists, songwriters, founders, podcasters, and anyone trying to build something from nothing.

If you are building a business, brand, song, podcast, product, or dream, creativity is not the luxury you get after everything becomes stable.

Creativity is the thing that creates the stability.

Before the money, sponsors, audience, leverage, freedom, or market response, there has to be an idea.

There has to be a spark.

That is why I created The Creator’s Hierarchy:

• Creativity: Ideas, originality, expression, and the spark that starts everything.
• Consumption: People consume your content, ideas, products, music, or message.
• Commerce: You create offers, partnerships, services, and revenue.
• Capital: You build ownership, assets, leverage, and financial freedom.
• Clarity: You create from peace, purpose, and freedom instead of pressure.

Download the Hogan’s Hierarchy graphic here:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/zq6se8ar46gx90ac0xmr1/74C14785-588E-4089-BBFA-920F5526CD97.PNG?rlkey=ykyp1ljjl51jv87qnjjjscyrd&st=v7c6wd5u&dl=0

This episode is about flipping Maslow’s hierarchy upside down for the modern creator economy.

I talk about why creators cannot wait until life is perfect to start, why creativity is often the way out of survival mode, why audience and attention come before revenue, and why the ultimate goal is not just success.

The goal is freedom.

Freedom of time.
Freedom of thought.
Freedom to create.
Freedom to be present with your family.
Freedom to build something that actually matters.

This episode is for the artist without a record deal, the entrepreneur without investors, the podcaster without a big platform, the songwriter waiting on a cut, and the creator trying to turn imagination into value.

Maslow put creativity at the top.

I think creators have to start there.

Partner Links:

Stay at The Countrypolitan Hotel:
https://shorturl.at/JtN6r

Bank with Studio Bank:
https://www.studiobank.com/

Drink Stage Water:
https://stagewater.com/

Clothing by Simon Says Nashville:
https://www.simonsaysnashville.com/

Connect with The Stephan Hogan Podcast:

https://www.tiktok.com/@stephanhogan
https://www.instagram.com/stephanhogan
https://www.facebook.com/stephanhogan

Email: contact@mavericksmediaco.com

Filmed in Nashville, TN
Produced: Stephan Hogan
Mavericks Media Co. Production

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Today I'm going to talk to you about Maslow's hierarchy. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. It's a thing that I heard from a therapist that I was talking to for a while. And basically she was like, Yeah, you you need some basics like uh food, water, sleep, and shelter. And then there's five things. There's five tiers. Think of it like the food pyramid. Like back in when I was in second grade, I think I learned about the food pyramid, and I think bread was on the bottom at the top. You had like ice cream. Well, I came up with my own hierarchy. I called it Hogan's hierarchy because it has two H's and my last name's Hogan. But here's the thing: when Maslow says you have to do all these things, then you can be creative, there's a huge problem. It's kind of like saying to a giraffe, grow a neck and then you can eat off of a really tall tree. It's like, well, I'm never gonna be able to grow a neck in time to eat from the tree. Well, I'm never gonna be able to do all the things I need to do in order to be creative, because the very thing that I'm gonna do to make money that would get me in theory to the top of Maslow's hierarchy is creativity itself. So I flip Maslow's hierarchy on its head and I submit to you that you have to be creative first and foremost. And I'm not saying you don't need food and water. What I'm saying is creativity is the means by which you will get to your goal. So let's let's do some examples real quick, man. Um, there's records in here. Eric Clapton, I see over there. Was he rich when he started? Was he being creative? Was he making a lot of money playing gigs when he first started playing guitar? Being creative, writing? No. Okay, Steve Jobs, no. Uh Netflix? No. If you ever watch that, was it Blockbuster documentary? Oh, that's interesting. Or it's talking about a streaming service they were gonna do at the same time, it would have killed Netflix. Um, who do I say? Steve Jobs, randomly Netflix, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, some of the big titans of the industry. For those dudes to do what they did, or you look back at like Andrew Carnegie, he had Napoleon Hill go out and write the book, Think and Grow Rich, bestseller over all time. You probably read it before, and it says what the mind can conceive and believe it can achieve. So the conception starts in your brain of the idea, which is creation. Okay, uh, biblically, you can't create without the creator. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Okay, that was the first thing He did. God started the hierarchy by creating. So, this hierarchy I came up with, very first thing, is ideas, originality, expression, the spark that starts everything. You create value from imagination, okay? And you I'll put I'll put a graphic of this in the uh YouTube thing, and I'll write these in the show notes. Then the second one is consumption. So now people are gonna consume your content, or they're going to consume your product, or they're gonna consume your music, whatever it is. Let's say you're making gummy bears, they're gonna eat your gummy bears, and they're gonna be like, yo, I really like these gummy bears, and they start telling their friends about the gummy bears. You see the market responding, okay, to your gummy bears. You get attention, engagement, demand, and you build an audience and a tribe. Then number three is the commerce. So we're not really seeing money come into the equation until number three. This for me would be the podcast, growing it to a place where I can get sponsors like Studio Bank or Stagewater here. Uh, they believed in me. And uh the Country Politons, a hotel in Nashville right by Printer's Alley. It's like walking back into a certain time in country music history. It's an IHG hotel, it's absolutely beautiful. And it's like for me to be able to have these brands that I'm representing um that are part of the fabric of Nashville, it's a real honor, but it also took a lot of hard work and bootstrapping it, and it's still a lot of hard work, but I see I'm seeing the fruit of that in commerce where I'm uh got a service or a product, and so there's partnerships, and you create offers, the market values and revenue grows. So this is like the important part in any business where you start to see money coming in. If you didn't start with like, and I'm saying like I'm treating things as a startup, and I'm assuming for my myself or for you that you don't have money as a startup, you don't have an investor, just you or you and your wife, or you and your partner, or you and a friend. You're creative, you have an idea, there's consumption, and then there's commerce. Now, from commerce, and these are this is a big jump here from three to four, from commerce to capital, because commerce, it could happen, so commerce to capital could happen fast or it could happen slow. Capital is ownership, assets, leverage, financial stability, multiple streams of revenue, freedom of time and choice, and you build wealth that works for you. So this is kind of a goal that a lot of people get to, um, which is almost like I won't like I never started a podcast because I thought I'd make money on it. Honestly, I just wanted to help people, and now I'm at a point where I'm like, wow, I'm making money on it. And now I'm thinking, like, oh, you know what? This is something I could build, owning my intellectual property, the assets of the podcast and evergreen content, and being able to do partnerships and have an impact and have an audience, which is the tribe, and the markets responded. This is really something I could do long term, but going from the place of having, you know, like the top podcast in the world to being a global top five percent video podcast on Spotify rap last year, which was a huge honor. Um, that's like 25,000 podcasts out of a half a million last year, top 25,000 is great, but I also need to keep building because 25,000 is still a big pool. I gotta, I want to get in that top 1%, baby. I want to be in that top 00001%. But all that to say, that's where that big gap comes in, is from like the point, like the top 5% to the top 4% to the top 3%, or uh you got a cut on a record because you're a songwriter, and then you got another cut, and that one did a little better, and that one like peaked at number nine, and then you got your first number one, and that recouped your draw, and then you got your second number one, and now you're starting to make more money, and that kind of thing. At number five, we have clarity, and this is where on OG Maslow's hierarchy, you would start creating, and this to me is where you have calm, you have clarity, you have freedom, you live where you want, you got that beach house, you think clearly, you create freely, and you have purpose over pressure. Because along the way from creativity to consumption to commerce to capital, there's nothing but pressure, pressure, pressure, pressure. And your problems, people have always said, problems don't go away, they just change. And there are some problems that are better than others. I think there's certain problems that come with privilege that are a good problem. Once you're able to create from a place of clarity at the top, it kind of circles back around to the bottom of being able to create again, and then clarity creates the middle space and peace to go deeper, and then each stage fuels the next step, and the loop never stops. So now you're in a cycle in motion of creativity to consumption to commerce to capital to clarity, and the goal isn't success, the goal is freedom. To me, success is am I a good dad? Am I a good husband? Am I a good man? Am I godly man? Godly husband, a godly dad. I look at a picture of my son and me on the wall, my birthday journaling. Am I being present while I'm building a business? I've got a mad challenge to Maslow's hierarchy. I don't think that the top is creativity and self-actualization. I think self-actualization happens at the bottom, and I think you work your way up to the top through your ability to create. I hope this was educational for you. I hope it made you think about something. Where are you at in your journey right now? Are you uh at a point where the market's responding? Are you generating revenue on that yet? If so, how much? And what does it look like to scale? Are you doing a SWAT on yourself and treating yourself like a business, looking at your strengths, your weaknesses, your opportunities, your threats? This is something that I do at the end of each year going into the next year. Where do I want to be? Q1, two, three, four. Where do I want to end the year? How am I gonna get there? I have this goal. All right, what's it gonna take to get there? Start treating whatever you're doing and wherever you're at like a business, like this little hierarchy that I came up with, and I hope you dig it. We'll be doing more of these solo podcasts because I have thoughts, I don't share them in a lot of my podcasts, so this is uh Hogan's happy hour.