What Everyone — Yes, Everyone — Wants
September 8th, 2006
I love to ask the big questions in life. And the biggest question that I’ve ever asked myself is this: “What does everybody (individuals and/or groups of people) want?” That is the question I asked myself in the late 1990’s as I was founding my company, The Building Blocks to Excllence, and being trained as a Ph.D. level behavioral scientist at the University of Florida. Since I was surrounded by so many brilliant business leaders and psychological minds at the time, I decided to start asking that question to these accomplished people to see if they could shed any light on the answer to my question.
The response I received from almost every one of them was that there is no single answer. “Everybody wants something different, Brian; there is no one answer to your question,” was their almost unanimous reply. However, I’m a stubborn person when it comes to answering big questions, so even though all of these incredibly bright people told me that my pursuit would be fruitless, I still felt like the answer may be out there. So I continued my quest of finding the answer to this enormous question.
I began the pursuit of this answer via a combination of powerful resources, beginning with my own personal experience, interviews with other knowledgeable people, and so called “common sense.” It soon became apparent that these resources would get me only so far, since as I’m sure you know, everybody has a different opinion regarding what everyone wants/needs more of — and many of these opinions can contrast with each other (e.g., “quitters never win” vs. “quit while you are ahead”, “birds of a feather flock together” vs. “opposites attract”). Thus, it became apparent that I had to go looking for my single answer somewhere else; I then decided to delve deep into the research literature to find the answer to my question.
Thousand of pages of research articles and books provided me with a much more clarity. However, as Sir Frances Bacon once said, “Those who dwell in ivory towers have heads of the same material.” I didn’t want a purely academic answer to my question, so I wanted to go back out into the “real world” and start asking professionals and “experts” who were actually facilitating positive changes in others what they thought about some of the answers I uncovered from the scientific psychological research. Those professionals helped the answer to become even clearer for me. However, I still was not completely satisfied because I felt like I only had the answer to my question in relation to our current era (i.e., the last 100 years or so), and an answer that may only relate to the American culture. So, I turned my focus to looking into the answer to this question across multiple cultures and across many centuries.
I wanted to know what wise people were saying about the answer to this question in the West, East, and everywhere in between. I was interested in not only what business leaders, scientists, and philosophers were saying, but also religious figures and artists thousands of years ago. I wanted an answer to this crucial question that stood the test of time and that seemed to be true across cultures and across different methods of truth-finding. Finally, after many years of investigating this question so broadly and deeply, the answer to the question “”What does everybody want?” became crystal clear to me.
The answer is . . . more group/organizational excellence (including businesses, research teams, and families), personal effectiveness (or, the ability to get things done or experience what one wants to experience), and/or life satisfaction (or, the experience of a felt sense of well-being). I have yet to talk with anybody who does not want to improve in at least one (if not all 3) areas!
You may be thinking “Duh Brian — it took you that long to find the obvious answer to your question?” However, this may only seem obvious after hearing the answer. Indeed, I have found that when you ask people the question “What does everybody want?” the answer I found is often not obvious to them until you actually give them the answer (try it with your friends and colleagues and see if they come up with the answer without you giving it to them).
You may also think that I wasted a heck of a lot of time doing this researching and interviewing to get to such a simple answer. Ah, but the search was well worth the time to me! As I was researching the answer to this question a powerful path to increased excellence, effectiveness, and satisfaction became apparent to me — a path that has helped individuals and groups across the centuries and across cultures; a path that is still incredibly relevant today. That path is made up of what I call 7 “Building Blocks” to increased excellence, effectiveness, and satisfaction. These Building Blocks are the foundation for all of our trainings, speeches, and personal consulting experiences.
By now you’re probably saying “Enough with the introduction Brian, what the heck are these 7 Building Blocks?” Here is a list of these 7 critical components, separated into 3 core areas (NOTE: for those of you who run teams, businesses, and/or families, you may want to check out the “group audits” underneath each “core area” below):
The 7 Building Blocks to Effectiveness & Life Satisfaction
- Core Area 1: Execution/Persistence (“The Marathon Mentality”)
(1) Persistence/Adherence/Execution
Take our Marathon Mentality organizational audit » - Core Area 2: Effective & Satisfying Relationships (“The Championship Relationship Mentality”)
(2) Self-Mastery: Leading Yourself
(3) Interpersonal Expertise: Leading Others
(4) Mission Connection: Strong Relations with an Organizational and/or Personal Mission
Take our Championship Relationships organizational audit » - Core Area 3: Achievement Enhancement (“The Achievement Mentality”)
(5) The 7 Essential Steps to Expert Goal-Setting
(6) Enhancing and Maintaining Focus
(7) Mental Training For Success
Take our Achievement Mentality organizational audit »
I want to thank you for taking the time to read this article. Our passion at The Building Blocks to Excellence is helping individuals and organizations to move toward enhanced organizational excellence, personal effectiveness, and life satisfaction. I hope that this article helps you move a little closer toward those worthy goals.
Article Filed under: IV. Miscelaneous
6 Comments Add your own
1. Janice Gaboury | February 21st, 2007 at 10:30 pm
Are you a Behavior Analyst? Well, what is a behavioral scientist anyway?
2. Brian Higley | February 22nd, 2007 at 10:10 am
Hi Janice!
And thanks for taking the time to read this post and post a comment.
A behavioral scientist is someone who is trained to use the scientific method to attempt to describe, explain, and predict human behavior. There are certainly other methods of attempting to accomplish this – such as intuition, reason, etc., but the behavioral scientist chooses to use empirical methods as much as possible to study human behavior.
Hope that helps – and welcome to the EU blog!
3. Jonathan Wood | December 18th, 2007 at 7:22 pm
Hi.
Thanks for posting your interesting article. However, I think you may have drifted down the wrong track. What people want is indeed all the same: it is contentment. Some people may say happiness, but in essence they mean the same thing – happiness is in my view a short term state whereas contentment can be a longer-term ‘trait’. However, if you were to ask your respondents what they thought that they would achieve as a state of mind if they had all the things you say that they all want, you would probably find that they would say that these things would make them content.
It is true that there are some steps that people can take towards achieving contentment, and these are based on either countering or building on pschological characteristics that seem inherent to the human race across cultures and across history. The way we frame these, and our openness to them, will depend on the cultural lens we bring to bear.
Despite your cross-cultural research, the conclusions you draw seem founded on a very western, ‘achievement-oriented’ model. This is not surprising, as the literature on environmental scanning, for example, states that what one gets out of a scan such as that you conducted is influenced far more by the mindset you have when you do the work than by the data sources you research.
However, most of the building blocks seem to imply that we need to adopt a goal-oriented approach to gaining a certain state of mind. There are other approaches that are rather different. For example, Buddhist teachings suggest that contentment lies in letting go of the search for contentment that manifests in craving and avoidance. These two factors are indeed inherent in the human condition, and are reinforced by society and culture. However, your thesis suggests that we can use the same thinking to solve our problems as created the problems in the first place. As Einstein said, this approach seems doomed to failure.
Good luck with the developing theory.
Cheers
Jonathan
PS I write as a psychologist; a professional strategist and change agent, and a student of Buddhist philosophy and practice.
4. Brian Mistler | December 18th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Jonathan —
First, I hear you — you can’t use the same thinking that created the problem to solve it. However, I don’t think most problems in business are caused by systematically deriving actions from values (the core of this model), but rather from acting without being in true alignment with values.
Now, I’ll add to that a broader “critique”…Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in the tractatus something like, “I have solved the most important problems of philosophy, and by doing so shown that most important cannot be written.” I think the same is true here.
You won’t find a training program that will help you achieve not achieving, or any system of wanting the will get one to not-wanting. If your saying these wants are limited by being wants, you’re right (of course). But, for a system of identifying and getting wants, it’s about as top shelf as they come I think, right?
As a student of students of Buddha myself at times, I’m reminded of what the Buddha said when he read this Internet posting:
5. Brian Higley | December 18th, 2007 at 9:59 pm
Jonathon,
Thanks for stopping by, reading this article, and taking the time to post your thoughts. A few of mine as I read your comment are below:
I think what you speak about in terms of contentment may be the same as our term listed above: life satisfaction – close to what psychologists call “subjective well-being.” It is possible that we are talking about the same construct using different terms.
As far as the claim that this article is more influenced by Western “achievement-oriented” ways of thinking, I’ll refer you back to the Buddhist framework you speak of above. I think that the best way to refute that claim could be via Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Path. Achieving insight into the Four Noble Truths (via the Eightfold Path) – and thus freedom from suffering – is certainly something that takes an achievement-oriented mindset (you may wish to have a look at 3 of the 8 steps on the Eightfold Path: “Right Intention”, Right Action”, and “Right Effort” to get a feel for what I’m referring to here). As the Dalai Lama himself has said, achieving freedom from suffering (the main objective of Buddhism) takes a strong desire to achieve that freedom!
Thus, we’ve found that whether one approaches life from an Eastern or Western mindset, it seems we are all seeking to achieve something – whether it be an outstanding business or freedom from “psychological contaminants” (as some Eastern psychologists refer to the craving, avoidance and/or delusions that block insight into the Four Noble Truths). There are many psychological, philosophical, religious, and mythological theories across time and cultures – our team has yet to find one that does not encourage adherents to achieve something (including Buddhism as discussed above) – even if it is to eventually achieve a state where achievement as we usually view it in the “West” seems less necessary.
Thanks again for your posting, Jonathan – and best of luck in all of your endeavors!
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