What Everyone — Yes, Everyone — Wants
by Dr. Brian Higley | 6 comments
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.
