A parlour game for the highly motivated

A clever entrepreneur I know, called “Peter”, has a favourite parlour game; it works best if the participants are decidedly ambitious. He asks them to choose their personal ranking for three primal motivations: money, power and recognition. Their answer tells them which career steps to take. It is a more practical – and visceral – version of “Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs”, which includes such vague concepts as self-actualisation. Possibly, we should call it “Peter’s hierarchy of human motivations”.

The quiz encapsulates the vital drivers in a blunt but brilliant way. It cuts out the fluff. The ingenuity of the selection is the simplicity: it boils down lots of complicated psychometric testing to three factors. And I like the honesty of the words. Unlike so many questionnaires, it does not pretend that our desires are all worthy. It asks us if we are, in the darkest parts of our souls, avaricious, megalomaniac or conceited.