Driven summary

The development of language and complex memory systems still doesn’t completely explain the Great Leap, however. The Great Leap is still somewhat mysterious to us – there’s plenty more room for other theories.

It’s also possible that certain skills encoded into our genes caused the Great Leap. In one study of this phenomenon, children and adults were shown photos of different environments and asked where they’d most like to live. The researchers found that none of them wanted to live in a hostile desert, even though they’d never actually experienced the harsh conditions of a desert.

The drive to acquire is the strongest of the drives and it explains why our behavior is sometimes irrational.

Our drive to acquire can overpower our rational thinking. The drive to acquire doesn’t just make us want material goods like food – it makes us seek out social status too.

You know the happiness and love you feel when you’re with your family? That’s when your desire to bond is being satisfied.

We evolved our desire to bond because it made us more likely to produce offspring. Raising a child takes a tremendous amount of work and a child has a better chance of survival if its mother has help looking after it.

It’s probably easy for you to recall the last time you wanted to learn something. After all, you’re reading this blink right now!

Humans feel curiosity because of something called the information gap. Our drive to learn awakens every time we take in information we don’t already have. That generates an information gap that makes us uncomfortable: we realize we don’t know something and we want to make that unpleasant feeling go away. So we learn.

We all have an instinct to defend ourselves and anything we consider valuable. If something threatens us, we automatically want to fight or flee. This is one of the most basic aspects of our survival.

That’s why the drive to defend was the first to emerge. It changed over time as the other drives developed, however.

So how exactly do the four drives work together to influence our behavior? The answer has a lot to do with our emotions.

Emotions generally result from our drives. We feel loved when our drive to bond is satisfied, and intrigued or proud when we fulfill our drive to learn.

Everyone is motivated by the same instincts. We can’t change our brain functions but we can understand them – and use them to our benefit.

You can use your knowledge of the four drives to run your company more efficiently. Your employees are at their most effective when all of their drives are satisfied. Creating an environment that tends to all four drives is the first step toward building a successful organization, whether it’s a small business or an NGO.