Three motivating factors that drive everything

I believe there are only three motivating factors that drive every human action.
1) The need/desire to be accepted by other people.
2) The need/desire to be significant to society.
3) The need/desire to avoid death and/or be immortal.

Despite the trend reports, talk about what matters and changing public opinion, these motivations don’t change and haven’t change for thousands of years. What DOES change significantly, however, are the actions taken in response to those motivations. It’s actually quite complicated because while some things seem to be universal like marriage and children, the motivation for those things varies from person to person.

There are those that believe children will give them unconditional love and acceptance, a tiny creature that depends on you for life will have no choice. It’s not long, however, before that child realizes their own motivations and takes action to fulfill them. Intentionally or unintentionally, they will likely come into conflict with the parent’s motivations.

Same with anyone who has children to be immortal or to gain significance by raising the child better than they were raised. Children can be full of disappointment because they are following their own needs. In their drive to be accepted, they may do drugs or otherwise harm themselves. To be significant, they may make life choices that are unacceptable to their parents.

Islamic extremists probably demonstrate the clearest example of two people’s motivations at conflict with each other. To gain immortality and significance, a suicide bomber kills himself and his enemy, a clear violation of the victim’s need to avoid death. Towards the same goal of spreading their religion, the Mormons take a quite different tactic. Instead of recruiting their youth to die, they enlist them to travel the world as missionaries, helping the poor and converting as they go. They are then obligated to get married and have many children.

We’ve all heard the phrase “You get more bees with honey than vinegar” or some variation. It basically means if your approach is sweet, not sour, you’ll find more people on your side. It is probably universally true that no one likes to be yelled at or strong-armed but it’s still a limited approach. Many tactics have been used, successfully, to gain support for one’s cause including intimidation. Likewise, asked as nicely as possible, there are still many things people have no interest in doing or being a part of.

Those three motivations are still the only thing that drives people to take action.

Simply replacing negative behavior with something positive doesn’t immediately solve the problem. Gangs, for example, give the member a sense of belonging and acceptance. They may also provide a feeling of significance. People might argue that their behavior is a product of not having enough opportunity, jobs, etc. But simply offering a gang member a job at McDonald’s is not going to be enough. Rap music, on the other hand, has provided a powerful substitute for many youths. The substitution has to be something that just as effectively meets the need for acceptance and significance but it will likely be different for each individual. Finding the right solution to such problems is the stuff of revolutions. These are powerful needs and they must be addressed.

The Internet is a clear demonstration of those three needs being met. MySpace and other social networks fulfill a need for community and acceptance. Other sites have tried to slap on a networking feature thinking it will instantly propel their membership base but unless they are truly fulfilling the community/acceptance need, it doesn’t make a difference.

Blogs, You Tube and other forms of self-expression satisfy a need to be significant and therefore accepted by others. The strange permanence of anything ever on the Web also provides immortality. But again, it has to be the right context. You can’t just slap on forums and feedback fields and expect users to feel significant.

This is where the studies can be useful. What kind of communities are people searching for? What kinds of activities make people feel significant? In what ways are people seeking immortality? Of course, I’ll argue that the most powerful solutions are those that haven’t been done before because they are genuine. We are ever evolving and seeking new ways to fulfill our needs. Once parents ensured their children’s success by pushing them towards careers that they wanted for them, now parents push their children to discover and follow their own path. Maybe neither is right or better but they are satisfying the same needs, just in a different way.

There’s a quote in Applebee’s America by a man in his seventies, a lifelong Democrat and a veteran. He voted Republican for the first time, for George W. Bush in 2000. He says while he doesn’t agree with what Bush stands for, he at least he knows stands for something. The book claims that people are no longer issue voters. I’m not sure that we ever were, I think politicians just thought we were. Instead, we vote for gut values, we vote for a candidate that we think we can trust.

I’ll venture a guess that "values voting" is in essence trusting that the candidate will pursue the same kinds of actions to satisfy their basic needs that we would.