Basically, there are two things that motivate human actions.
Cat and cheese.
Cheese is a reward associated with anticipated pleasure. We approach cats as punishment associated with anticipated pain or loss that we avoid. If you understand the relative intensity and distribution of cheese in a person’s awareness and the relative intensity and distribution of cats in the same you can pretty accurately predict how that person will move through life at any given moment.
Researchers have long studied maze running behavior in rats and surprisingly when cheese is placed at the terminal, rats tend to move more quickly through the maze than they do it simply by exploring in a non-directed fashion.
Rewards incentivize approach behaviors. On the other hand when the scent of a cat, a rat’s natural predator is placed into a maze behind, rats tend to move even more quickly through the maze than they do when they are moving towards the cheese, so punishment incentivizes avoidance behaviors.
The punishments are more incentivizing than Rewards and this is because pain is overpowered on this planet relative to pleasure, people like rats will do more to avoid pain than to secure pleasure. Understanding this basic principle will help you make more accurate predictions both about your own behavior and about that of other people. Punishments are more motivating than rewards. However, to optimize motivation you ideally want to utilize both. The fastest maze-running behavior is observed when rats are running away from a cat and towards some cheese and the more these things are clearly defined and immediately present the more powerful this incentive becomes.
Another thing to keep in mind is that in this maze that we call Life there is no escaping the cats and no avoiding the cheese. On some level cats and cheese are inherent to the maze itself. They never disappear entirely, they just change their forms. For instance, some first-level cats might be the inner ability to avoid the basic necessities of life — food, clothing, and shelter. This cat can be avoided in several different ways begging, stealing or more socially performing a service for another. The cheese here would be the money necessary to procure those things, a low-level cat. I am lacking a fulfilling relationship with someone who really interests me is a high-level cat. I am depressed is a low-level cat, I am not entirely safe is a high-level cat.
The cats never really go away they just sort of evolve and this is just because what might have motivated you to run here at the beginning of the maze might not be the worst expending any efforts the further you progress through the maze.
If optimal motivation is accomplished through a combination of cats and cheese then a smart person will find ways to explicitly and intentionally introduce cats and cheese into his or her own life, and that’s because the person will understand that it’s really the presence of these things and especially the presence of cats that instigate constructive meaningful action.
Furthermore, where we believe we are relative to the incentives that we have identified with a significant perception of reality. for instance, if you believe that we have identified significantly alter our sense of self and our perception of reality. If you believe that we are close to the cat and very far from the cheese, that life is going to feel like hell, vicious, hopeless and cruel. on the other hand if we are close to the cheese and very far from the cat then life is going to feel like heaven, rewarding, and abundant.
Both conditions exist in the same maze. The maze is not one or the other. The maze is the medium through which those conditions emerge and while it’s true that some folks just seems to be born closer to the cheese than the cat and vice versa, it’s actually mostly up to us what we choose to consider a cat and what we choose to consider some cheese. One person’s cheese will not motivate any effort by any other man’s cheese.
The cats and cheese are not objective features of reality but perceptual constructs that evolve as we do, and if this is true then we might actually have much more control over whether we live in hell or whether we live in heaven than we may at first anticipate.