When I try to get my five-year-old son to do something he doesn't want to do, it's like moving a mountain. Every night I need him to brush his teeth, he never wants to brush his teeth. I need him to eat his vegetables, he never wants to eat his vegetables.
It doesn't matter whether it's bedtime, turning off a TV show, putting down the books, or just putting away the Legos, it is absolutely impossible to get him to do something he doesn't want to do. You would think that somebody who used to make a living by convincing patriots to spy against their own country would have some kind of leverage over a five-year-old boy. Now, aside from...
from the fact that I just haven't mastered parenthood yet, I will say that I have seen the four foundational motivations play out in my family life just like I saw them play out in the international world. Now, those four motivations Motivations fall into a nice convenient acronym that I call RICE. R-I-C-E.
RICE. I try to remember it by remembering that everybody in the world eats rice. Rice is one food product, one staple in every country in the world. It doesn't matter if you're in Africa or in Asia or if you're in Latin America or the United States, everybody eats rice. So it's very easy to remember R-I-C-E are these four foundational motivators.
Now what do they stand for? R is the place that we'll start. And R stands for reward.
Everybody knows what it's like to put your phone number and your email address and your home address on a Win a Free Cruise flyer whenever you come across one of those at a timeshare expo. We even know what it's like to work extra hours at work in the hopes that we're going to get an annual bonus. Reward is a simple motivator to understand.
And reward is what makes the world go round in many ways. You work harder in your business to make more money. You stay up late doing extra homework so that you can get a better grade in the class. Reward is simple to understand, and reward is everywhere. So I try to use reward on my son.
I need you to brush your teeth. And if you brush your teeth, I'll let you read an extra book at night. Ah, now all of a sudden, we start making progress. Now if it were up to my son, I'd say, you've got to brush your teeth.
And he'd say, okay, but I want chocolate milk afterwards. That's not going to work so well. The second motivator common to everybody in the world is ideology. Ideology is the letter I in rice. Ideology is something that's born out of your belief systems.
Now not just religious beliefs, but also your own patriotic, nationalistic beliefs. In the United States, we largely fall under the Christian religion. So many people come from an ideological background that's based in Christianity. There's also folks who come from an ideological background that's based in atheism or Mormonism or even Islam.
But that's one piece of your ideological beliefs. The larger piece is actually your own national identity. Around the world, everybody from every country takes extreme pride in the country that they're from.
When you understand that, you understand how difficult it is. for someone from one country to convince someone from another country to spy. But when it comes to using that ideology to motivate one another, it's not about understanding what people believe in, it's understanding why they believe in it and how you can use that to your advantage. Let's look again at my son. My son doesn't want to turn off his TV show.
He wants to keep watching his TV show. But I know that ideologically what my son really wants is to play out the TV show that he's watching. I know that because I watch him and I know that ideologically he is all about putting himself into the characters that he's watching.
That's what he believes. When the show ends he believes he is Batman. When the show ends he believes he is Superman.
He believes he is Tony the Tiger. He believes he is whoever he was just watching. So he wants to play act that out. His imagination goes crazy.
So I get him to turn off the TV by asking him if he wants to play pretend. Do you want to play pretend right now? Oh, I want to watch this show.
Well, if you watch this show, we're not going to have time to play pretend. Well, then I want to watch, then I want to play pretend. And that's how it works. That's how you leverage that simple ideology in a child's mind into a child's world.
I recognize that I probably should feel bad about manipulating my child, but to a certain extent, I'm doing what I can do to try to take back some control in a life that otherwise the control was taken away from me. Every parent out there knows that your children are the ones that really rule the roost. We're just trying to keep up.
The same is true in the business world, where we have bosses and co-workers and shareholders that drive the decisions every day. We're just trying to keep up. By applying the four foundational motivations into your work life, into your personal life, You have an opportunity to gain back the control that was taken from you. So the R stood for reward. Very easy concept for us to recall.
And I stands for ideology. Religious ideology, but also nationalistic ideology, and whatever circumstances, whatever belief systems a person has at that point in their life, at that point in their maturity, in their personal development, that is all ideology. Now C...
is the third core motivator. And this is the most uncomfortable one for us to admit to and the most uncomfortable one to talk about. Because C stands for coercion. Coercion is when you force someone to do something.
It's that manipulative force that drives us to do things out of shame or guilt. The thing that makes us do things because we're afraid of consequences. Coercion is very real and very powerful. And to be honest, Most of us respond very, very well to coercion, as long as we don't know that it's coercion. Consider any electoral cycle in the United States.
Consider any time that you have been hard-sold something from a salesman, from a car salesman, from a window salesman at home, anything like that. When we feel cornered, when we feel ashamed or embarrassed, we will act in any way we need to act so that that feeling ends. It's almost a guarantee. That's why hard sales tactics continue to work.
That's why politicians continue to file hate ads. Because it's easier to get people to make an action that you want them to make when you leverage coercion as your primary motivator. Nobody will admit that they're using coercion.
Nobody wants to admit that they're making a decision because they're embarrassed, ashamed, or afraid. But we do it all the time. It's the reason that we tell mom. That her meatloaf is good on Thanksgiving when you know it's not because you don't want to hurt her feelings because that would make you feel ashamed so you are motivated to lie rather than tell the truth. It's the reason that we go to work and we pretend that we feel well or we pretend that we want to be social when in fact we just want everybody to leave us alone.
It's because we're afraid of the consequences of being brusque or being rude. So coercion is a very real and very powerful motivator. The trick is to make sure that you don't give away the fact that you're using coercion. The final of the four core motivators is E, ego.
Ego is an interesting one because most of us apply the concept of ego to those people who are egotistical. Ego meaning they're so full of themselves, they're so pompous, they're so proud, that person has an ego. But ego is much deeper than that because ego not only applies to people who are proud of themselves, but ego also applies to the reasons that people are proud of themselves. It's easy to consider the pompous individual who's so full of himself that he tells stories about himself or herself and how great they are and they inflate themselves.
But ego also applies to those people who routinely sacrifice for others. Those people who put themselves out, who... are inconvenienced for others, those people who pay money for other people, those people who do everything they can in their power to protect the feelings of someone else.
The reason that they're making those decisions is because of ego-driven motivations. That person wants to feel like they are sacrificing for somebody else. Ego also has to do with those people who want to be very quiet and very reserved. They don't want the spotlight on them.
They don't want to be the center of attention. Those folks are also operating from a place of ego. What they want is not to be noticed. What they want is to be on the down low.
What they want is to support somebody else. Anytime someone is coming from a place where they're getting what they want, that's an opportunity for an ego-based motivational lever. R-I-C-E, RICE.
Those are the four foundational motivations for anybody in the world. Everybody in the world eats rice. Now how do all these play out in my family life? I know that it's hard to upsell my child on something he doesn't want to do.
So for the most part Rewarding him doesn't work. I know that I can get him to play act whatever show he's watching, so that gives me an opportunity to turn the show off. So ideology is pretty effective with him. He's five years old, so the concepts of fear and shame and embarrassment don't really apply.
He spends most of his day running around in his underwear, so it's not really going to work for me to try to coerce him into turning off the TV or brushing his teeth. And my son is too young to really understand the concept of ego. He doesn't really know what he wants. So how am I ever going to reach him at a place where I know what he wants?
So what that means is that the appropriate way to leverage my son to do what I need him to do is to lean on ideology. Well, ideology also happens to be the most powerful of all four of those motivators. Ideology makes people do things that otherwise doesn't make any sense.
For example, in the United States, if you hear your national anthem. There are certain things that you're going to do right away. You're going to stand up. You're going to straighten your posture. Even if you're driving in your car, once you hear that national anthem, you sit up.
There's something about the way that we're raised. There's something about the idea of your national anthem as an American that makes you feel like you have to demonstrate pride. That's just the way it is. It's likely that way in every country, but I only know what it's like to feel that way as an American. What sense does it make that a song would make you sit up straight?
What sense does it make that a song would make you look for the flag in the room? What sense does it make that in a room of 2,000 people if you play the national anthem, there's a good chance without any direction, without any guidance, they're all gonna stand up, they're all gonna face the flag, they're all gonna put their hand over their heart. That is ideology at work. You see similar things happen in China, you see similar things happen in Russia, it doesn't matter where you are.
Ideology is the most powerful tool. of motivators. Tie it back to someone's religious beliefs, tie it back to someone's family beliefs, tie it back to someone's nationalistic beliefs and you can get them to do the most amazing things just through understanding their ideology.
The second strongest motivator is reward. Reward is the first one that we talked about. It's the one that everybody understands and it makes sense that it's powerful. We all understand that there are things we would do for money, there are things we would do for fame, but then there's a limit.
With ideology, there's really no limit. That's what makes it so uniquely powerful. But with reward, I really want a good salary, but I'm not sure that I want to work every weekend. I really want to win this cruise, but I'm not sure that I want to give you my true name or my true phone number to try and win it.
Reward is powerful, but not as powerful as ideology. The third strongest is ego. Ego makes us do things because we want them, and if you can connect someone's ego to what you want them to do, without them recognizing it, you'd be amazed at what happens.
I used to have a friend when I was in Bangkok who was a military intel guy. His name was Kevin. He was an awesome dude. And Kevin had this game that he used to play called One Up.
And he found that whenever he sat with somebody, usually another military person or another male, there was always this moment. Where Kevin would tell a story, and the person he was sitting with would try to one-up the story. So Kevin made it into a game. He would tell the lowest, simplest story, and wait for the other person to tell a story that one-upped him.
So then Kevin would tell a story that one-upped that story, and the next person would try to one-up it again. And on and on until it just got ridiculous. And it was amazing to watch Kevin do this, because he would be able to say something that was utterly ridiculous and totally untrue. And the other person would still respond trying to one-up him again on something that was even more ridiculous and likely even more untrue.
All of that ties back to ego, this idea that you have to be something that you feel like you have to be. And in Kevin's case, he was always trying to find that egotistical person who was trying to be the best. But remember that ego also applies to people who are trying to appear giving or sacrificial.
or people who are trying to appear intelligent or like specialists. So you can leverage ego in a lot of different ways to get what you want. Not surprisingly, the least effective of all of the motivational options is coercion.
I know I mentioned earlier that coercion can be very effective in moments, but the problem with coercion is once somebody figures out what you're doing, the game is lost. Once somebody realizes that you're trying to intimidate them, once somebody realizes that you're trying to guilt them or shame them, what actually happens is they don't ever want to talk to you again. Any semblance of trust is lost.
choose to use coercion you have to use it very carefully and if you're at a place where you think coercion might be the way to go I would actually encourage you to consider ideological motivations instead let me give you one example of how I use this in my work life every day I am trying to build everyday espionage I'm trying to get people to see it to understand it to recognize its value I want people to support the brand I want people to support my message and I do that by leaning on the four core Motivators. When I want someone to come to one of my lectures or when I want someone to attend an event that I'm hosting, I offer them the opportunity to come as my guest. Come be a guest of honor.
Come for free. Come let me introduce you to some people who are there. I'm trying to get them to attend using a reward based motivation. They may otherwise not want to come at all but if they're going to get something free out of it or if they're going to get a cool introduction out of it, or if they get to feel like a guest of honor, those are all very rewarding feelings for an individual.
Then I have those people who I want to expose everyday espionage to, and I know that they are already intrinsically, ideologically driven by a need to improve themselves. Whether they're self-improvement junkies, whether they're just knowledge junkies, whether they just want something new, some new edge over the competition, I know that ideologically, Everyday espionage is delivering to them that edge. I don't have to offer them to come to one of my lectures for free.
I don't have to invite them and offer them some kind of reward. All I have to do is tell them, hey, everyday espionage is about gaining a unique advantage in the workplace, gaining a unique advantage in your relationships, gaining a unique advantage in everyday life. And the ideological motivation behind that person drives them to come.
Coercion is one that I don't use very often because it's not worth the risk. of sacrificing a relationship just by trying to guilt someone or shame someone into coming. But I'll be honest, if there's anybody I use coercion on, it's my wife. My wife is super busy. She is always elbows deep in some kind of family emergency.
The only way I can ever get her to come to my events is if I ask her nicely and kind of guilt her to say, hey, I really wish you could come see this. I really wish that you could come. be part of this because it's so important to me and I really want to share it with you. It's horrible husbandry. I get it.
It's a bad thing to do. And I tell my wife in full honesty, I know that I'm making you feel guilty, but please come because I really want you to see what I'm doing. And sometimes she comes and sometimes she doesn't. I'm fortunate that I don't compromise my relationship with her because I'm able to tell her outright that I'm using a coercive motivational experience.
It's also a benefit to me that my wife is a former agency officer, so she understands Rice as well as I do. So when she knows what I'm doing, she'll call me on it, and then it's very clear. The last way that I get people to come experience everyday espionage is through ego.
And there are people out there who just want to feel like they have access to something other people don't have access to. So I will use that part of their ego to get them to come. And I'll say, hey, everyday espionage is a startup.
It's brand new. There aren't many people out there who know about it, but it's gaining a lot of momentum I would be great to introduce you to what I'm doing while it's still at the ground level Man when I find somebody who really wants to be part of something at the ground level their ego kicks in and they really want To be part of it. There's nothing wrong with that There's nothing wrong with leveraging someone's ego to get them to invest to motivate them to participate and that's the main difference between manipulation and motivation.
Manipulation is using these four motivators to get people to do something you want them to do. Motivation is using the same four motivators to get people to do something that they want to do. Manipulating people makes them do what you want them to do, but motivating people makes people do what they already want to do.
Motivation builds relationships. Manipulation destroys relationships. Espionage is all about Manipulation. Everyday espionage is all about motivation.
I want to see every one of you succeed. I want to be successful with you and for you as we continue on this journey. If you've enjoyed what we've talked about today, if you can see rice in your real life, if you want to apply these concepts in your everyday life, stay tuned because we have so much more to go through.
What we have ahead of us is so much more. And I invite you to join me as we continue to learn about everyday espionage. See you next time.
Thank you for listening to the Everyday Espionage podcast. Remember to review and subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform. And if you took something away from today's conversation, find a friend and share the message. We have a GHS1.
It's a D-O-M, a D-U-M.