True Motivations

Everyone Has Two Reasons For Doing Something

Matthew Larsen
October 23, 2024

True Motivations

I was with this girl the other day and I put my phone in Do Not Disturb in front of her and she said “do not disturb so I won’t see any other girls messages if they pop up.”

Definitely a fair assessment of the situation. Perfectly reasonable conclusion, really.

However, not the real reason.

The real reason is I was way too nervous one of my (guy) friends would randomly text me something insane and cancel-worthy (as they often do) and make her think I am completely fucked in the head.

That is a greater concern for me by a magnitude of 10x. The imaginations of my 2-3 best friends is far more terrifying than all of the pretty girls of the world combined.

I make a lot of content focused on lead generation and sales and business, and some very basic (or fundamental, depending on who you ask) advice is to “find their motivations” and then focus on that.

The problem is that there is almost no real way you are going to find people’s deepest, most intimate motivations, and you certainly are not going to be able to do so en masse, in a systematic and consistent way.

A lot of the times, the perfectly logical reason that someone would be doing something is not the actual reason at all (re: the story above). This happens more than one might think, and because of that, one must be careful in thinking they know what someone wants. When you begin to get "too slick" or "too cool" and think you "know you target market" then it makes it a lot easier for you just to talk at the prospect instead of talking with the prospect.

This is a problem because much like the story above, one may come to the wrong conclusion and start thinking and talking about stuff that is not based on someone's true motivation. In the story, I was glad she said something instead of pretending to ignore it. It led to a much happier situation.

Someone told me once that everyone has two reasons for doing something:

The reason that sounds good
The real reason

In 99.9% of cases, you are going to get #1 and will likely never uncover reason #2 which is the actual reason they did (or didn’t do) whatever thing is in question

This is the part of the email where I sloppily transition from a real life story about something complete unrelated to a business lesson.

When you are running your business, you never know who is watching, what their true motivations and desires are, what they will like, what they won’t like, what they will develop a connection with, and what they won’t.

That is why it it’s important to give yourself as many chances to emotionally connect with your target audience as possible, in a way that is easy.

Just like you don’t know what they are thinking, they don’t know what you are thinking.

Because it is very easy to misjudge someone’s real reason for doing something (like in the story at the top) it would be a good idea set yourself up for success as best as possible.

There is this anonymous sales account called BowTiedSalesGuy who I follow on Twitter. Not really sure if he is a sales trainer or just a sales guy but I bought his sales course a while ago and was pleased with it.

In his course, he narrows it down to five questions and I think these five questions give you the best possible chance at finding someone's true motivations, and then it is off to the races from there.

I have included a picture of these questions so you can save it. This is a picture he posted publically on his Twitter account, so no, I am not revealing his intellectual property from his course.

Enjoy, and good luck.