I am a curious researcher, deeply interested in learning what motivates people’s decisions and actions. I meet a great number of people in the course of my work, and when the opportunity arises, I often ask them an unusual question: "What motivates you?" A strange thing to hear from someone you’ve just met. I receive a wide variety of answers – from things you would expect, such as “my family,” “my career,” or “freedom,” to the somewhat less usual, such as “my boat,” or “horseback riding,” to the downright exotic, like “travel to Mars!”
I have found that when we get down to our most fundamental drives, there are three primary motivators common to most everyone. These are the things driving all of us, though not everyone is driven all three – at least not at the same time. The “big three” are money, sex, and power.
Now, in order to obtain any or all of these three things, I contend that you’re going to have to engage in quite a lot of two specific activities: communication and negotiation.
If you want more money, for example, you’re going to have to communicate about it. If you have a “regular” sort of job (one with hourly wages or a salary) it will be necessary to communicate with your boss about a raise – and perhaps with other people as well. If you run your own business, you’re going to have to communicate with your suppliers, customers, staff and partners or colleagues about ways to increase production, revenues and profits. You may well have to communicate with lenders or investors, too. In your quest for more money, you might even have to communicate with your spouse and family about your household income and budgeting. And in all of these interactions, negotiation will come into play, to some degree, and in one form or another.
Do you want more power? More influence? Once again, you’re going to have to communicate and negotiate. I meet people who claim that they don’t want power or influence. They’ve almost certainly mistaken the meaning of the terms, for you exert some degree of power and influence any time you seek anything from another or others. Have you ever done that?
The third of man’s most prominent motivators is sex. Many people wonder what exactly I mean when I talk about this. It’s not necessarily the sexual act itself that is the ultimate goal here. Contact and pleasant interaction with, as well as recognition, admiration and affinity from others of the sex one finds most attractive (or both sexes, in some cases) might be considered mere shadows of raw sexual activity – yet they still are craved and cherished by almost every individual. And obtaining these things requires, once again, communication and negotiation. In fact, I’ve met many people (usually male) who consider themselves masters of these two human arts, and practice them with the greatest of intensity, devotion and finesse nearly every week – even every day – all with sexual gratification as their singular objective.
Interactive Trio
A colleague of mine, Peter Frensdorf, recently commented that if you’ve got plenty of just one of the three motivating factors – money, sex or power – you’ll almost automatically end up with plenty of the other two! I think he’s got that right, and history certainly holds abundant evidence to back the idea. With enough money in hand, power and sex can be acquired. If your sex appeal is strong enough, you don’t even have to be terribly clever to leverage it into considerable money and power. And with sufficient power over others, money and sex are yours for the asking – or taking.
Foundations Of Success
Social research on the subject of personal success has led to the conclusion that approximately 15% of a person’s success is the result of his or her intelligence, experience and formal education. So what makes up the remaining 85%? Human engineering. Human engineering is the study and activity of human interpersonal relations in pursuit of any given objective. In other words, it is the science of how we conduct interpersonal communications and negotiations.
For centuries now, man has thought that he existed as what we might call Homo economicus – sensible, rational beings living in a well-ordered economic world, capable of rational thought and most often making rational choices. Over the last 20 years or so, scientific research in the field of behavioral economics has documented that this conception is far from accurate. We do not most often make good decisions. We are not rational in many of our conclusions. We do not live in an orderly economic world. We live instead in a behavioral economic world.
This world is one traditional economist do not like – in part because it threatens to deprive them of the dominant positions they’ve enjoyed for so many years. They also dislike it because it suddenly strips them of the ability to predict (or at least claim they can predict) a society’s economic future. In an orthodox economic world (if one actually existed), people would do what one expected them to do. In a behavioral economic world, people’s actions and reaction are far more difficult to anticipate or predict.
Another phenomenon I’ve observed is that we, as a society, do not seem to adapt to new ideas as easily as societies have in the past. This is perhaps because we have a society with an increasingly large proportion of older people. Birthrates are declining (in Western societies), while at the same time we tend to live longer. Older people tend to be more entrenched in their attitudes, beliefs and habits than younger people, and this factor is reflected in the way the society as a whole behaves.
An interesting experiment that documented this phenomenon was conducted in the context of a U.S. presidential election. In the months leading up to the election, researchers examined book sales on Amazon – specifically sales of books about Barack Obama. Among the available selections were books critical books of Obama, as well as favorable, positive works. It was found that books favorable to candidate Obama were purchased mainly be people who had already decided to vote for him. Most of the critical books were purchased by voters who had already decided to vote against Mr. Obama. Apparently buyers chose books that would support or confirm decisions they had already made.
This article is extracts from my new book Positive Impact published by Motivational Press in the USA May 2015.
