Pain Pleasure: Our Primary Motivators

By Jeremy Standiford

Network marketing is all about motivation. Motivation to take action, motivating potential customers and business partners, and also motivating your downline to take action and succeed. If you want to motivate someone, you must first know what already motivates them. Pain and pleasure are our primary motivators, every purpose of every action we take is to either avoid pain or gain pleasure. The greek philosopher Aristotle spoke of this in his Rhetoric:

"We may lay it down that Pleasure is a movement, a movement by which the soul as a whole is consciously brought into its normal state of being; and that Pain is the opposite."[1]

This concept has been around for ages, and understanding this concept is one of the fundamental keys to success in life. Here's a question: why do you brush your teeth? You may have many reasons for brushing your teeth, but ultimately you brush your teeth because helps you gain pleasure, avoid pain, or both. Brushing your teeth is not some basic human need, it's a habit that we've formed over the years. We've learned that not brushing our teeth equals pain, because we may have had a few cavities in the past and had to visit the dentist, and we all know that the dentist equals ultimate pain.

Advertisers use this concept to get us to buy things. One of the ways advertisers do this is to get us to associate something we find pleasurable with their product. Check out this commercial:



I find this commercial funny, because Michael Jackson doesn't even drink Pepsi, yet here he is singing "you're the pepsi generation" to the tune of "Billie Jean". This commercial is incredibly powerful, because it associates Pepsi with something the audience finds pleasurable, that is, Michael Jackson's music. Also, Michael Jackson is giving the audience a new identity (I'll talk about new identities in a later post), telling them that they are the "Pepsi generation". So the audience is experiencing pleasure from hearing the tune of "Billie Jean" while at the same time be exposed to the Pepsi logo at this point they're probably thinking, "Well, if Michael Jackson says it, then it must be true, I better go buy some Pepsi, because I'm part of the 'Pepsi generation'".

The most powerful commercials show the audience how they can avoid pain AND gain pleasure by using this product, check watch this commercial by Discover Card:



It shows all these people in terrible situations, one is getting attacked by an animal and needs rabies shot, one is in a car accident, one couple is in the middle of a hurricane, and guess what? They're not in pain at all, and in fact they're smiling because they have a discover card that pays for everything they need gives them 5% cash back!

When we consider our actions and whether or not to take action, it is often the avoidance of pain that wins rather than the potential pleasure we could gain. The avoidance of pain is much more powerful to the human psyche than gaining pleasure, this is because our brain knows when we accumulate enough pain, we die. A prime example of this is procrastination. You probably have things that you know you should do, for whatever reason, but you put it off, why? Because you associate more pain to taking action than not taking action. But then, have you ever reached the point where it's more painful to not take action? I know when I was in college I would put off doing assignments until the last minute. That's because it was more painful to do the assignment up until the night before the paper was due, then it became incredibly painful to not do the assignment because I would get an F for that assignment and could potentially fail the class.

So what's the whole point of this? Well, people require motivation, that's where leadership comes in, and knowing the pain pleasure principle will help you inspire people to succeed. For instance, the old 90's style of network marketing is extremely painful to most people, that's why 97% of network marketers fail. It's time consuming because once you've exhausted your warm market, you don't have a lot of leverage in the prospecting process. You're reduced to pitching your business to anyone you come across, risking your reputation as a sane member of society in the process. You hear no, time and again and each 'no' is a blow to your self-esteem. Then you go on the internet and post ads everywhere "make money working from home" and all that, but nobody seems to respond, because they've seen it all before.

I've found a much easier way to build my network marketing business and you can use the same tools and techniques I'm using to build my business. It's uses attraction marketing, which is the concept of providing value first, and building a relationship with a potential customer or partner before asking them to do anything. It makes me hunted instead of the hunter. With the techniques myself and my team uses, I can generate hundreds of qualified leads eager to work with me for my business without a lot of investmed time or money.

If you're ready to take your network marketing business to the next level and build a huge downline click here to get started.

1. Aristotle. On Rhetoric Trans. by George A. Kennedy. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1991.