What motivates us or what we “value” is the window to our world.
It is what drives our behaviour. We all have the six motivators in varying degrees. Today, we are going to focus on the Theoretical/Knowledge value.
There are different ways to look at each motivation. On one side of the scale, a person who has a high score in the theoretical/knowledge area will seek out information at all times. You may know someone who is constantly checking facts and looking at background information on television characters while watching TV! They are driven by opportunities to learn, and if they are passionate in this motivation they may be seen as a “perpetual student”. If you are one of these people, can you imagine being in a career where there is no reason for continuous learning?
On the other side of the scale, there are people who are driven by utilizing their past experiences and intuition. They prefer to only seek out specific knowledge when necessary. Others are more satisfied in a career where they must continually acquire knowledge on a daily basis in order to perform well.
Now think about a time when you have been having a conversation with someone regarding education. If you believe that everyone should constantly learn but are conferring with a person who believes that there are better ways to utilize time, they may be thinking:
- “There are other things I’d rather be doing than educating myself on things that I won’t use.”
When looking at it from your own perspective, you may be thinking:
- “Why does everyone not want to constantly learn everything possible?”
As you can see in both cases, when it comes to how you value knowledge, tensions may occur since you are seeing this value from a different perspective. This is because you are on the opposite side of the spectrum.
In our next blog we will discuss the second value/motivation: Utilitarian
