Do You Know Your Motivational Pattern?

Identifying and understanding your core motivational drive—what truly moves you, daily—is one of the most powerful Anti-Mimetic tactics that I have ever discovered.

There is no doubt that motivational energy can be siphoned and suctioned off in a million different directions, spent up chasing a thousand thin (aka highly mimetic) desires and ideas. But simply knowing what your core motivational drive feels like when you are fully engaged can be the key to realizing when that dissipation is happening.

If you are disengaged, distracted, or increasingly feel unsatisfied no matter what you accomplish, it could mean that your core motivational drive is not being fully tapped into.

Let me explain.

Background and Context

In the late 1950’s, Arthur Miller, Jr. was a disciple of Bernard Haldane, the grandfather of what we might now call “career counseling.” Haldane would often ask people what they find enjoyable about various activities, and he would seek to help them identify their strengths. His work was the forerunner of popular tests you might know today, like StrengthsFinder.

Through his work with Haldane, though, Miller discovered something else—something that would lead him to his life’s work: coming alongside people in their vocational discernment by helping them identify a motivational “design”, or a distinct pattern of results they were driven to achieve no matter what they were doing, from schoolwork to parenting.

He discovered something akin to what James Hillman has called “the soul’s code”, which you could think of like a kind of spiritual DNA.

When Miller Jr. looked closely at the autobiographies of the people he was interviewing, he noticed that there were always clear, enduring patterns of motivation in their stories.

Even if a person shared a dozen achievement stories that were seemingly disparate and unrelated to them, coming from different times and places in their life—a little league baseball game, a management consulting gig, a volunteer activity, solving a marital problem—he began to see patterns in their motivational energy.

Even when people were engaged in what looked on the surface to be totally different activities, their underlying motivational drive was the same.

Miller’s process was fairly simple. Each person would share a story about a time in their life when they believed that they did something well, and which brought them satisfaction.

The story had to be about them taking action to achieve something—not something passive, like watching a life-changing movie (Legends of the Fall was good, but it was not me wrestling the bear). It is in our actions that our character and our motivations are revealed.

The stories could range from executing a family recipe perfectly to writing a good email or even a book. One of my stories is about a project that I did in my 5th grade science class. For whatever reason, it is one of the most satisfying accomplishments of my life—but until recently, I never quite understood why.

I have always known that it was important to me, but I did not understand that it has remained in my memory this long because it was an example of me exercising nearly all of my motivational energy, to the point where I felt fully alive and lost track of time—a state of flow.

Whether the accomplishment is big or small, or impressive by anyone else’s standards, doesn’t matter at all.

80,000 stories/autobiographies later, Miller Jr. and the team of people that carried on his work (including his son, and now his grandson, my friend Josh) identified at least 27 key “motivational patterns” in the stories of the people they shepherded through this process.

Once you see a motivational pattern, you will not be able to unsee it. A pattern has the following characteristics:

1. The pattern is irresistible
2. It is insatiable
3. It is enduring
4. It is good
5. It can be ordered toward love—you could think of your motivational pattern as how you are fundamentally motivated to love, or at least the kind of loving acts that are most satisfying to you. (That, of course, does not mean they are the only ones you should perform—but there is something beautiful about creativity in love, and integrating one’s motivational drive and learning to love in ever-more creative ways is something extraordinarily fulfilling.)

The following themes come from Miller’s System for Identifying Motivated Abilities (SIMA). Do you recognize yourself in any of them?

I will be sharing my own top three core motivational drives below.

Motivational Themes

A few of the 27 Motivational Themes (all of them are available in full post, for paid subscribers, here.) of the core motivational themes:

Advance. You love the experience of making progress as you accomplish a series of goals.

Bring to Completion. Your motivation is satisfied when you can look at a finished product or final result and know that your work is done and that you have met the objective you set out to accomplish.

Comprehend and Express. Your motivation focuses on understanding, defining, and then communicating your insights.

Evoke Recognition. You are motivated to capture the interest and attention of others.

Experience the Ideal. You are motivated to give concrete expression to certain concepts, visions, or values that are important to you.

Master. Your motivation is satisfied when you are able to gain complete command of a skill, subject, procedure, technique, or process.

Overcome. Your motivation focuses on overcoming and winning out over difficulties, disadvantages, or opposition.

(Note: there is no qualitative difference between these motivational drives. None is “better” than any other; they simply are what they are, and all of them are good, or at least can be good. We won’t get into shadow sides of motivation in today’s post.)

Application to Our Lives and Teams

Nobody exercises any one of these motivational drives entirely independently from the rest. The most fulfilling activities come when a person is integrating all of their core motivational themes into the same activity. Many activities can even be reframed so that that happens.

You can already probably imagine that some of these core motivational drives (i.e. Overcome) might be more important in certain kinds of people, like company founders, where others (i.e. Influence Behavior) might lend themselves well to others, i.e. someone who is sales.

You’ll find some of my top motivational drives below. It is no surprise that, being fundamentally motivated to Comprehend & Express, I was highly motivated to write a book like Wanting and to do it well. There was such intrinsic motivation there that I probably would’ve done it for free.

This exercise is also invaluable for groups—because once you understand the core motivational drives of various people that you work with, it becomes clear what mix of people make up the ideal team on the level of motivation, and not just on the level of “skillsets”.

(When I look at the train wreck that is the Los Angeles Lakers this year, for example, I see a team made up of a bunch of front office executives that paid zero attention to the motivational make-up and mix of the players. A costly mistake.)

Once all team members have gone through the exercise, you can do a simple analysis to see how their motivational patterns hang together and complement one another—or not.

Plotting out who has which motivational drives on a team is a great first step for a sports team, a group or division within a company, or even a family system. I have seen this kind of insight affect change almost immediately. (My wife and I know each other’s motivational drives very well—she is constantly motivated to “Excel”, which I always keep in mind when we’re playing a board game.)

But before you can do this team for a group, you should do it for yourself. And once other members of your team have gone through the process, there is a system that needs to be put in place for remembering and honoring core motivations so that they are not lost or buried in the frenetic pace of life.

The key is to align your core motivational drive with your thickest desires. Once that happens, it’s like the power from a fire hose being used to fill up a family pool rather than blasting a single patch of grass over and over again until there is nothing left. It becomes life-giving.

You do not need to take the online assessment (about a 30-minute commitment) to begin identifying your stories of deeply satisfying action, or even to put your finger on your top motivational drives. You can probably to do that simply by taking the time to write out some key moments—focusing on key stories—from your own autobiography.

If a story from any point in your life comes to your mind, trust that it is coming to your mind for a reason. It must, in some way, be memorable enough for you to be thinking of it. Write it down.

A Final, Practical Word

You can use this worksheet to help, if you choose to engage in this process. If you’d like to go all of the way and take the online assessment that guides you through a series of questions about each of your stories and finds the ‘pattern’ in your motivational drive, then you can do so here.

The act of sharing your story and listening to others do the same can create incredibly powerful bonds. That’s because you are sharing—and listening to others share—some of the most meaningful action in their lives. The joy is palpable when this happens.

Sadly, most people are never asked to share these kinds of stories. I know many people who have worked side by side with others in the same office for a decade and who do not have a single colleague who knows one of those stories. That is a shame.

We are suffering from an epidemic of not feeling that we know, or are known by, others—except at the level of political beliefs, Covid behavior, tweets, or instagram posts. Absolutely nothing at the core.

Perhaps sharing some of these stories—and giving others the permission and opportunity to do so—is one small step in the right direction.

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