bythemethod.com blog

What motivates people? This is a question that has pre-occupied people since some clever person decided to tie a carrot to the end of a stick to get a donkey to move (did anyone actually ever do that?). The truth is that the carrot is different for everyone, but why is this? The simple answer is that everyone values different things.

Many people believe that money is a good motivator – give someone a bonus and they will work hard to earn it. There are all kinds of problems with this – not least that for most people money isn’t a good motivator. Most people want what they believe the money can buy them (security, peace, love, health, freedom, etc) but all of these things can be acquired without money. To try and get this motivator to work we are constantly bombarded with adverts to try and make us greedy – we fall for it for a while but soon become disillusioned when the promised lifestyle doesn’t arrive with the acquisition of money. This is born out time and again by surveys that show that rich people tend to be less happy than the rest of us.

In the end what really motivates us is our values. This is one of the reasons that knowing what you value is so important. In some self help systems you will be told to listen to what your insides tell you about values. I think this is only part of the story. To really understand what motivates us we need to understand what we value – relying on feelings is not always productive.

So to get motivated you need to know your values.