It's never "the thing" that drives us

I heard a speech today from someone who hasn't really ever studied psychology.  But his opening setup for his speech was on what drives a person.  I am assuming that he was talking of intrinsic motivation.  He mentioned that people make decisions based on their driving force.  He singled out one driving force of one individual and then went on to talk about how we all should adopt this one driving force.

That flies in the face of everything we know about the decision-making process.  One of the best descriptions of decision-making is from the book by Gary Klein called Source of Power: How People Make Decisions.  His book is based on ten years of observations and takes into consideration a great number of articles written by experts in psychology as he applied the principles found in these articles to his observations.

Another view of decision-making is given in this 3 1/2 video.  It shows the affect of stress on decisions.  Other views exist as well, but this is a good sample of the plethora of ideas that exist on the subject.

The bottom line is that someone's driving force for doing what one does is a misrepresentation of how people make decisions. Many factors contribute to decision-making not one driving force.  And, the factors that contribute to making one decision are not necessarily the reasons for making the next decision.  Even when a hierarchy of reasoning exists for decision-making, the hierarchy is flexible from one decision to the next and can change over time.  \

So, the premise of the speech I heard today was erroneous, the examples, though moving, supported only one factor in a hierarchy on one occasion.  That's too bad since one person's strong belief in what he spoke on wasted my time because of lack of knowledge.  I try to limit the times that waste mine.  But, today my decision to listen to this speech failed me.  I need to make better decisions.  There are a plethora of books on that topic you can be sure.  Using Amazon's search engine for their site will give you a good picture of what's available on that topic.