What drives you?

@Random

Happiness. Food. Love. Status. Power. Money. Sex. Fun. Contribution. Success. Recognition. Peace. Rest.

This is fairly the list most people would come up, when they are asked 'What single thing that drives you to do what you do?' Each of these would have varying levels of driving power with few of them being the 'ends' with others the 'means'. Yes, the prioritized list "depends" on the person.

Hmm.. so what?

Because, knowing the answer helps in 2 ways:

1. Know thyself better - aids to choose the right profession (leisure activity or for that matter, 'anything' that one wants to do in life) and do it an effective and efficient way (Yes, MBA with consulting career corrupts one's mind to use cliched jargons like these! ;))
   
2. Know a bit of others, so that you can suitably motivate them!

So, let's continue with our analysis...

I think these forces can be mapped to 3 different human emotions. First is fear - that of punishment, non-acceptance, death, deficit, hazards, injury, security etc. The motivational tool associated with fear is 'stick'. Second is desire (and its stronger cousin greed) - that for luxury, wealth, beauty, power, acceptance etc. The motivational kit that works with this emotion is 'carrot'. The last one is passion. This is probably more self-driven than the other two. Can also be summarized as getting motivated externally vis-à-vis inspired internally.

This is how, you and me, the non-psychology students would think and come up with an unstructured analysis. Never mind - The infamous "Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs" is a well accepted, structured, exhaustive and most authoritative analysis on human motivation. Seems like all of us climb up the pyramid till we reach Self-Actualization!

Courtesy: Wikipedia
(Click the figure to read the text)

Not bad.. our 3 emotion analysis fits as well - Fear: Levels 1-3, Desire: Levels 2-4, Passion: Levels 4-5. So, to reach higher levels, you need to move from fear to desire to passion as the motivational tool.

Oh, yeah.. like any other tool, these can be used in both ways - constructively or destructively, as life keeps the options always open for us. As human beings, we should exercise our mind to think and choose the 'right' path.

@Regular

Gulaal was the movie. (Gulaal - in Hindi means the red power used during Holi). The movie takes you to the world of modern day Rajputs. True to its caption 'Love, Power and Revolution', it had all the elements but in a distorted manner. Director Anurag Kashyap's yet another non-conventional movie. Almost everyone in the movie is imperfect, selfish, and tries to accomplish his / her own agenda - Be it the manly Kay Kay Menon or the lady Kiran who goes to any lengths to attain the power or the innocent Dilip who brings the twist in the end - every character is well etched. Except may be the drug addict cum lady lecturer, who apart from giving philosophical dialogues to Dilip (e.g. "you loved her so much that you didn't see her") doesn't fit well into the story. It's a serious movie (except may be in a couple of place with dialogues like "Mere paas maa hai"). Definitely, a different experience watching the movie. I would say do not give it a miss.

Off late, I lost hope in motivational / self-help books. In many cases, they are cliched, very biased, impractical, too-obvious, repetitive and inaccurate. My belief just got reinforced with the last book I read. I was deceived by the categorization of "Rich Dad, Poor Dad" as "Business" both by Warner books and my librarian, in addition to the book-selves of my B-school friends. The author himself agrees that he is a terrible writer, but he clarifies one needs to be a good seller - like how his books are selling like hot chocolate cake. I'm not saying the book is 100% bakwaas - There are few sensible things like:

• Learn to use your emotions to think, not think with your emotions
• Don't work for money, let it work for you. Work to Learn
• With each push, life is saying "Wake up, there is something I want you to learn"
  

But it could been said in far few pages than 260. Hmm.. seems true - "Quality of the product is less important than how much you understand your customers and how well you sell it"