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090 - Driven

Hello there! Kevin here with another episode of the Feel-Good English podcast. The only podcast in the world that’s helping you become better at English and better at life. Giving you lessons based on the best non-fiction books, Ted-Talks, and other inspiring and enlightening content to help your English learning journey go more smoothly. Let’s make it smooth… And today, I’m going to help you understand human behavior more. This lesson is going to be based on a book called “Driven”. This book is by two authors and the authors are Paul R Lawrence and Nitin Nohria; Nitin Nohria, that’s an interesting name.

And what this book is about is that we have four Instinctive drives, instinctive motivations to do what we do in life. So, these four motivations basically guide us through life and help us make decisions. Either good decisions or bad decisions and these are all based on core human drives. So, ‘a drive’ is like a motivation. So, we’re talking about four core human motivations. The purpose of this book is to help us understand why we make sometimes very irrational decisions; why we make decisions that we regret. For example, going to the mall and spending way too much money and then coming home and saying, oh my God, what did I do? This book answers questions on why we do crazy things like that; why your wife might do crazy things like that.

And also from a business standpoint, it helps you understand why potential customers would buy something. So, if you’re in the area of business, of sales of product development, or whatever that may be, these drives influence people’s purchasing decisions. So, very interesting stuff! I’m going to go over these four drives briefly.

And if you want a transcript to this and other Feel Good English podcast episodes, go to www.feelgoodenglish.com where you will find more than FULL TRANSCRIPT

enough information on how you can get access to the transcript.

So, without further ado, without further delay, let’s get into the episode on the book “Driven”.

So, it’s important to point out that these drives, they talk about in this book, these are all based on our evolution the way that we evolved over time as humans. And these are instinctual, instinctual meaning they’re part of our instinct. They’re actually created to help us survive. So, these are survival instincts, so, back in the times when we would be running around the land hunting and gathering – meaning collecting food and living in caves and all of this fun stuff, we created these instincts to help us survive.

So, for example, the first drive is‘to acquire’ to acquire things. To acquire is to obtain things. If you didn’t have food, you would die.

So why do we these days, why do we go out and buy way too much? Why do we get a lot more than we need? Why do we have huge amounts of food? If in the past as our ancestors did, they just had enough food to survive.

If you think about how consumerism works these days, how retail stores advertise to their customers, how supermarkets set up these huge beautiful markets with more than enough options and food, it’s based on this very instinctual drive for us to seek out things that are based on survival. To seek out necessary things, but also to seek out more than others to increase our social status to increase our social, social, social status – that’s kind of hard to say, so, we have power over others. So, we have a better chance of surviving.

Pay attention to this, look around see all of those people how they’re seeking out ways to get ahead of other people so they can be the first in line to get that piece of buffalo that they just killed.

Humans also have a very strong drive, a very strong motivation to bond. B-ON-D to bond us to connect, to connect. So, to connect with people. We have a very strong desire to connect. When you’re around your family and friends you feel loved. That’s when your desire to be, to bond is being satisfied.

And according to the book, we evolved our desire to bond because it made us more likely to produce offspring. If we did it on her own. If we had a child and if we only had ourselves to raise this child, to bring up this child, it would be very difficult. Some people do it today, but technology I think has made this a little bit easier as well, but bringing up a child on your own would be very tough.

So again, taking a very common human motivation to be around people to be around family, to be around friends and getting going way back going way back to where this desire came from, is very interesting. I mean, if you think about it, we’re animals and we just do things day to day not knowing exactly why we’re doing it, but books like this that go behind these motivations are quite interesting. So, bringing up a child on your own would be very difficult.

What do we do instead? Well, we surround ourselves with people, we bond with others.

From a business standpoint, this drive to bond can be seen everywhere.

Businesses that cater, that serve this drive are: communication businesses, telecommunications like cell phones, social networks, restaurants, dating services, all of these things that are using this desire to bond with each other selling this drive – interesting ay?

So, next time you’re on Facebook, realize you are there out of this very ancestral need to bond with other human beings. Does that freak you out a little bit?

The third drive and I obviously like this one a lot, is that all humans have the drive to learn. We’re curious and we want to learn things. I am a very curious person. What about you? And in the book, they say this desire, this curiosity is because of something called the information gap. Our drive to learn awakens every time we take in information that we don’t already have. So, we’re taking in information from all of the stimulation around us, and if we don’t understand it, we have this very instinctual drive to figure it out, to satisfy our curiosity. So, this is what an information gap is. Gap is a space, so we feel uncomfortable if we don’t have the answer to something. So, we take in this information, we don’t know what’s going on, we don’t understand it, we feel uncomfortable, so we have to figure it out now!

Anything come to mind? Is there a service that satisfies this curiosity, this desire to learn? It’s one word. This word is… Google. Think of Google. Google is our modern way to satisfy this information gap. Thank you, Google!

So, why do we need to learn things? What is the purpose of this? What is the instinctual purpose of this? Well, it allows us to predict the outcome of our decisions. What’s going to happen in the future. We’re learning from mistakes, learning from things that we don’t know in order to make a smoother transition into the future, or in order to avoid problems in the future. If something negative happens, we’re less likely to repeat that.

And in a practical sense, this drive to learn and to figure out solutions to things that when we take in information that we don’t understand, our drive to want to figure that out, is part of the human condition. It’s part of how we are built. And if you aren’t consistently learning and try new things, what happens? Well, you get bored, you get restless, you want to be there. Restless means you’re anxious you’re getting not tired, but you’re getting anxious; you want to change your situation or you get bored.

So, obviously this podcast, the Feel-Good English podcast is helping you with this desire to learn, right? And hopefully you’re not restless and bored. I hope not. But, books and seminars and other courses, and universities. All of these are based on our drive to learn. And don’t forget about Google.

The last drive here is, our driveto defend. To defend ourselves when we feel threatened, when we feel that we are in danger, when we feel threatened.

We all instinctually defend ourselves and we also defend what we consider valuable. One of the most basic aspects of our survival is either fighting to defend ourselves or fleeing. F-L-E-E is to run away, to get the hell out, to get out. So, to get out of somewhere is to get out quickly, is to flee F-L-E-E.

And this drive is intertwined with the other drives as well. If you think about, we have the drive to acquire things, and people are trying to take our stuff, we are going to fight for them, right?

You also have natural instincts when you’re being threatened or when people are trying to take your stuff you’re going to lose something your heart rate increases, you start breathing faster, or stop breathing. Your muscles tend to get tense. And this prepares you to get out of that situation. To get out of there as fast as you can.

Another example, if you’re in a relationship, and you’re bonding with somebody, somebody is trying to take your lady; what do you do? You instinctively get upset. Think of all the jealousy that’s created from this.

You’re bonding with somebody, the person that will keep you alive and if you lose them, you will die the next day. Well, these are instincts and you will fight to keep this person or you’ll just get jealous and fight with that person that you’re not trying not to lose. And that creates a tricky situation, because you’re fighting with the person that you don’t want to lose. But, anyway jealousy is a topic for another day.

And again, in a business sense, practical sense, because of this need for humans to defend themselves and their possessions, whenever we feel threatened we go into defensive mode. We find ways to defend ourselves or our property. So, think of businesses that sell services or products based on these on this drive. Businesses that cater to the drive like martial arts studios – so you can become a karate master, weapons; they sell guns, you buy guns.

You protect yourself. Home security systems. All of these products and services that help us defend our possessions.

So, those are the four drives.

If we have these motivations, how do they actually influence our behavior.

We want to defend our property, which is our boyfriend or girlfriend, and then we fight back. How does this work? Well it works through emotions.

This emotion that happen results from our drives – from our motivations.

So, like we’ve talked about in other episodes, emotional intelligence, being able to watch your emotions to catch them before you instinctively act on them, not all the time, but sometimes when necessary, can help you make smarter decisions in life. If you’re strictly living like a caveman from 10,000 years ago, totally based on emotions, you’d probably find yourself in some sticky situations in the future, sticky situations, meaning – not fun, complicated situations in the future.

So, learning about emotional intelligence, how to disconnect from some of these instinctual drives can help us avoid problems in the future, but can also help us from being taken advantage of by all of these companies out there trying to sell us all of these things based on our human drives.

If you’re in business, learning about these will help you sell your product or service, but if you’re consumer, the next time you go to a huge shopping center, think of all of these drives and motivations that are forcing you to seek out all of those things in the mall, what kind of emotions are stirred up while you’re there.

So, next time you’re in the mall and your wife is in a store buying something; you say get out! If you buy that, you’re being a cavewoman!.

hahaha….That’s crazy… don’t do that!

So, that will do it for today’s episode. I hope you learned something new.

Remember that’s your third drive, the motivation to learn new things.

Again, if you want transcripts to this episode go to

www.feelgoodenglish.com and you can learn how you can get a transcript to this. Which is based on your first drive, to acquire.

And you can find me on Facebook as well. [Feel-Good English.com] and you can bond with other Feel-Good English listeners out there. Through FeelGood English, there is plenty to learn.

You’ll also find other things that you can learn about on

www.feelgoodenglish.com which satisfies your third drive.

And lastly,to defend, if somebody’s trying to take advantage of you in an English-speaking country and you don’t know how to defend yourself in English, you better boost your English skills, which will satisfy your fourth motivation. See what I did there? Anyway, that’s enough about drives for today. Until the next episode of the Feel-Good English podcast, have a wonderful day and week.

Lastly, I do have a caveman joke for you. This one will be a little hard to understand, so go to the website to figure out what it means.

What do you call a wandering caveman? A Meanderthal.

m-meanderthal. Meanderthal!

See in the next episode!