Uncover your best self—find your micro-motives—play the judgement game

For generations, success required us to be the same as everyone else in our field, only better. This "standard formula" works for fifteen to twenty percent of the people. However, it leaves most of us feeling disengaged and frustrated to various degrees. Moreover, the standard formula seems to be an only practical path to financial security and fulfilling life. You can find fulfilment by playing the judgement game to uncover your best self.

For most of us, when we think about success, it's pretty narrow, and we end up thinking about things like wealth, status, power. And we sort of think that you have to choose between that and being happy – and dark horses show us that you actually don't have to choose." —Todd Rose

In the Dark Horse Project at Harvard, Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas studied women and men who achieved remarkable success even though nobody saw them coming. Uncovering your “micro-motives” are crucial to finding fulfilment. Interestingly, these motives are the collection of your super-specialized things that make your heart sing. Fulfilment leads to success at work, not the other way around. In their new book, Dark Horse: Achieving Success Through the Pursuit of Fulfillment, Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas, social scientists from Harvard, set out the judgement game as an easy way to identify your micro-motives.

The authors show how the four elements of the dark horse mindset empower you to reliably make the right choices that fit your unique interests, abilities, and circumstances and will guide you to a life of purpose, passion, and achievement.

A Dark Horse

A dark horse is a person who triumphs against the odds. They are winner nobody saw coming. Dark horses blaze their trail to a life of happiness and prosperity. The take responsibility for their actions.

The folks that Rose and Ogas interviewed, as part of their Dark Horse project, included an opera singer, a dog trainer, a hairstylist, a diplomat, a sommelier, a carpenter, a puppeteer, an architect, an embalmer, a chess grandmaster, a midwife, an art conservator, an astronomer, and, a landscape architect.

Interestingly, Rose and Ogas identified that dark horses shared a mindset of four elements that hidden inside dark horses’ seemingly one-of-a-kind journeys. These insights are practical principles for achieving the success that works for anyone. This approach does not depend on your SAT scores, whom you know, or how much money you have.

The Dark Horse Mindset

Harness your individuality in the pursuit of fulfillment to achieve excellence.

This dark horse mindset insight is useful in guiding you to a life of purpose, authenticity, and achievement, no matter where you are in your career.

The personalities of dark horses are just as diverse and unpredictable as you would find in any random sampling of human beings. However, there is a common thread that binds them all together: dark horses are fulfilled.” — Todd Rose and Ogi Ogas

So, how do you find fulfilment for yourself?

There is no such thing as one-size-fits-all fulfillment.

There are four critical elements of fulfilment. The first is finding your micro-motives. These traits are the clue to your best self. Here is an approach to help you find yours.

Your motives are the emotional core of your individuality.

• What you desire and what you do not want — defines who you are in a unique and profoundly personal manner
• When you take actions that match up with your true motives, your journey will be compelling and satisfying.

However, if you misjudge or ignore your micro-motives, your progress will be plodding and dreary. You may abandon the road altogether.

It is essential for you to know what puts the wind in your sails. Rather than what someone else thinks will get you going. A crucial element of the dark horse mindset is knowing your micro-motives.

Saul Shapiro’s Story

Saul's story is one of more than a dozen stories in the book. I choose Saul’s story, as he too started as an electrical engineer. I have seen similar stories play out in similar forms over the years. While most do OK, few find fulfilment — they miss the opportunity and do not achieve success.

Saul has an unusual micro-motive: he likes aligning physical objects with his hands. When he encounters something amiss, such as a tilted picture frame, or a wobbly wheel on a shopping cart, his mind is drawn to manipulate the components until they are right. The urge to align things is not on any list of universal motives. However, for Saul, this desire is genuine, potent and deeply personal.

One of Saul’s most fulfilling projects at college was carving a sphere out of a block of wood by hand. Saul became obsessed with design professor’s assignment. After chiselling a rough sphere, he placed it in a bag that he carried wherever he went. He frequently put his hand inside the bag to feel for uneven spots and used sandpaper to smooth them. Eliminating the imperfections filled him with gratification. When Saul handed in the sphere, it was so perfect that his prof refused to believe he had not used machine tools.

Success as an engineer

Like most engineers, Saul was hired to tackle a severe technical problem. He was challenged to create a physical interface that would convert an analog signal on an old-style copper wire onto a digital signal on a newly invented fibre-optic cable. It required precision alignment, within a fraction of a micron, of a semiconductor chip the size of a grain of sand with fibre the width of a human hair.

Saul was successful. The telecommunications industry widely adopted his interface. It made his employer a fortune. However, Saul only received a small bonus. This inequality led him to question his role as an engineer.

I would see guys with MBAs making presentations, and they were making much more money than me and getting to run the company. I started to think to myself; Maybe I should be one of those guys.”— Saul Shapiro

Middle Management Challenge

Like many engineers, he abandoned a fulfilling engineering career and moved into middle management. While many engineers have the behavioural competencies to become make great executives, Saul’s collection of micro-motives was not compatible with his new role. He did not enjoy supervising others. He was not interested in managerial activities like networking, presenting his ideas to others, or persuading them from his point of view.

Saul’s most potent micro-motives — working with his hands, aligning objects, tinkering with gadgets and mechanisms, doing math calculations, and, working alone — were primarily neglected in his role as a manager.

Saul spent the next 16 years as a middle manager at media and tech organizations. However, in his late forties, he could no longer get hired as a manager. Also, he could not return to his previous career because his engineering knowledge had become outdated. So, when he was 53, he was working part-time at H&R Block doing people’s taxes for $10 an hour. He was not making much money or providing direction to the organization, the reasons he had switched careers in the first place. He was unfulfilled.

Next Step

When he took stock, one thing that still meant a lot to him — being his boss. However, since he did not want to start a business from scratch, he went looking for affordable franchises. A franchise broker who told him about the availability of opportunities in New York City — such as employment agencies and elder-care agencies.

One franchise caught Saul’s eye: upholstery repair. While he had no experience with it, he knew that success depends on one’s ability to align fabrics and patches. Saul knew that he knew he would enjoy the process. Also, on the plus side, he would be able to:

• use his hands
• immediately see the results of his labour
• work from home so he would not have to invest in a shop
• work by himself so he would not need to oversee employees

Saul opened an upholstery-repair franchise in Manhattan in 2013. He mastered the trade. Today, he does repairs for Broadway shows, TV personalities and Times Square hotels.

"People who know me best would agree that I’m happier now than with anything else I have done with my career. I enjoy what I do almost every day, and I’m financially secure. In the end, I figured out how to align my livelihood to my nature.”— Saul Shapiro

Saul found his micro-motives by enduring years of jobs that did not suit him. There has to be a better way!

The judgement game

It took Saul 35 years to figure out what he wanted to do. You need to find your micro-motives, hold them up to the light and leverage them for success.

Using the judgement game, you can discover your micro-motives quickly. Start by taking advantage of an instinctive activity that you perform every day. How often over the past week have you judged someone — a colleague, a talking head on TV, a person in the checkout line?

Use your unfiltered reactions to learn something about yourself. Your micro-motives consist of deeply rooted feelings, subtle behavioural preferences, natural desires and private longings. Your goal in playing the judgement game is to use your instinctive reactions to others to zero in on these reactions and trace them to their roots.

Three steps in the judgement game

1.     Become aware of the moments when you are judging someone

We all do this all the time. It is human nature to react to others, whether it is a mail carrier, police officer, massage therapist, neighbour, store clerk or someone on a magazine cover. Develop an awareness of when you are doing it, so you can consciously attend to your reaction.

2.     Identify the feelings that occur as you judge someone

If you have a vivid response, you are close to one of your micro-motives. It does not matter whether it is positive or negative, celebratory or condemnatory; the feeling needs to be strong. Remember, you are trying to get in touch with your authentic emotional core.

3.     Ask yourself why you are undergoing those feelings

Be honest.

You must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.” —Richard Feynman, physicist

Focus on what you would like and what you would hate if you had their life. For instance, when watching a celebrity interview and find yourself thinking, “How can anyone be thrilled when he or she is chasing riches or fame?” then you know that money and acclaim are probably not powerful motivators for you.

If your reaction to Saul’s story was “the guy’s an upholstery repairman, let’s not pretend he’s successful!” You have learned something valuable about your micro-motives. Status and acclaim matter significantly to you. That is fine — own it.

Resisting the sense that some motives should be driven by such as making money or helping people is the most challenging part of the game. If you fall into the trap, you are likely to suppress or downplay your micro-motives. The judgement game enables you to avoid these traps. However, you need to be attentive and specific.

If you are favourably judging a park ranger, you may initially think, “Being outside and around nature, all day would be great.” Alternatively, judging a debt collector, your reaction might be, “Oh boy, I’d love tracking down deadbeats and forcing them to pay up.”

To attain fulfilment, you must know what indeed motivates you — whatever that may be.

Keep Digging — The Details Matter

Keep going through your feelings until you have gone as far as you can.

For example, you might also realize, “Even though being outside would be great, a park ranger seems like a lonely job. I do not think I could handle the daily isolation.” Now you have identified two possible micro-motives: the desire to be around nature and the passion for steady social engagement.

Alternatively, when judging the debt collector, try to determine which gets your heart beating faster: is it the process of tracking down a deadbeat, or the act of making them pay? Is there something about catching a person who is trying to avoid being caught that energizes you? Or is it about being an agent of fair play and administering justice when nobody else can? The details always matter, when it comes to knowing your micro-motives.

The judgement game is all about you

Keep in mind, the purpose of the judgement game is not to coldly assess the merits and deficiencies of other people. It is not about them at all. Your goal is to use your intense emotional responses to discover your hidden desires. In the judgement game, you are both the player and referee. Only you know for sure when you have found one of your micro-motives to its fullest depth.

Playing the judgement game takes time to learn. However, it is far more reliable and valid than standardized tests of motivation. There are many career tests that employers and guidance counsellors use to evaluate the motives of employees and students each year. These tests often determine how your responses may match those of the “average professional” in each field.

We use an assessment that is designed to help you identify your unique pattern of preferences — your micro-motives and your superpowers! We refer to this unique combination as your behavioural DNA.

It is easy to misinterpret standardized assessments of motivation, as they ignore micro-motives. We assess the presence of different motives:

• the desire to interact with other people vs. the desire to be alone
• the desire to conform vs. the desire to rebel

These desires are not black or white. They are a continuum. They are circumstantial.

In the Age of Personalization, there is a new definition of success. It recognizes that individuality truly matters: Success is living a life of fulfilment and excellence.

As parents

We want our children to be happy, healthy, and doing what they were meant to do with their lives. We can help our children succeed in a more meaningful and fulfilling way by capitalizing on their uniqueness and pursuit of personal satisfaction.

However, rarely do we ever ask our kids “What motives you?” Even if we did it would be tough for them to answer. As parents, we spend much time telling our kids what should matter and very little time to support them in figuring it out for themselves.

I would expect to see greater happiness and harmony since if we are teaching our children to focus on getting better at things that matter to them, instead of trying to be better than the kid sitting next to them, [, they will] no longer have to see each other as competitors.” — Todd Rose

I encourage you to play the judgement game with your kids. Rather than asking “How was school?” or “How was soccer?” Ask “What do you like about school (or soccer) today? Probe a little to understand why. They need to discover what matters to them and what motivates them.

Help them by recognizing when they have strong reaction positive or negative to an activity, event, a person, etc. it is telling them something about themselves. They are a detective discovering what motivates them. This kind of self-knowledge will help our children live a fulfilling life.

It is all about helping them find their unique path rather than subjecting them to a standard formula and then building their talent stack to achieve it.

Final Thoughts

The commonly accepted formula for fulfilling goals and dreams is knowing your long-term goals, working hard, and staying the course in the regardless of obstacles until you reach your goal. This formula fails for far too many. The “dark horses” find success on their terms. The dark horse mindset can guide you to a life of purpose, authenticity, and achievement.

The secret to success is the pursuit of fulfilment that leads to excellence rather than the pursuit of excellence that leads to fulfilment. Your actions are genuine. Having this mindset empowers you to consistently make the right choices to fit their circumstances and complement your unique interests and abilities.

When you commit to embracing the diversity of your micro-motives and understanding your behavioural DNA, the most opposing of them can be reconciled, leveraged and consolidated into your unified sense of purpose. Your understanding leads to career satisfaction, something that fewer than twenty percent of people achieve. Understanding your micro-motives and your behavioural DNA is a better formula for success.

I also encourage you to watch Rose’s TEDx Sonoma and our short video on best-fit staffing.