ONLY THOSE WHO ACT will be successful. Successful people are action oriented. For this reason, successful entrepreneurs do the right things at the right time. Certainly, this principle is easier said than done, especially in larger companies. There are clear hierarchies and anyone who oversteps them should be prepared to face negative consequences. Action is not really desired equally everywhere.

The principle of action orientation is highly significant in start‐up companies. Their current motto is often like the Nike slogan: “just do it.” And more and more established companies are letting entire departments “just do it” to find answers to questions related to digitalization and disruption.

Successful people in particular tend to be distinctly action oriented. They align their actions with their goals. Those who want to be commissioned should be in frequent contact with their clients. Those who want to climb the career ladder in a company are well advised to act in the interests of their superiors and keep in regular contact with them. In order to pass a professional exam, you have to work to prepare for it. That means making sacrifices.

But what is it that drives a person to act? In this context, the avoidance of pain and the creation of joy are closely related. According to this, people aim at bringing about those events that lead to positive emotional states by either striving for something (appetence) or avoiding it (aversion).

Whoever deals with the principle of action orientation cannot avoid dealing with the concepts of motives and the motivation of a person. The terms “motive” and “motivation” both derive from the Latin verb “movere” (to move, to drive). Motives and motivation are closely related. However, they must be distinguished from one another.

Motives are directional, situation‐independent stimuli for action. They are deeply rooted in the personality. In part, they are genetically determined and vary in intensity from person to person. In this context, motives are motivations for behavior in the sense of a guiding, activating, direction‐giving force. When we say that we give a motive a high priority, it is both a qualitative and a quantitative statement. The qualitative statement is that the motive names the reason we act. We give priority to one motive over another. We ask ourselves what is really important to us and for what do we strive? The expression of a motive, on the other hand, also makes a quantitative statement. How often, or intensively should the motive be satisfied? For one person, for example, going to the nearby butcher, or baker is physical activity enough for the day, whereas another person strives for physical exhaustion, and there is nothing better than hard training sessions. Thus, there is a very low and a very high level of motive expression within a motive scale. A person whose motive expression is in the middle range can show both tendencies in their behavior. In this case, it is much more difficult to make a statement about their motive characteristics. Motives must always be considered in a certain context. How a person lives with their motives and what motivates them also depends on their environment.

The process of motive stimulation is called motivating. It is triggered by incentives. The result of motivating is a person's motivation. It triggers an action in a person towards a positively expected goal. Psychology distinguishes between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In intrinsic motivation, an activity is performed for its own sake. A person acts on their own initiative. No external incentive is needed to perform an activity joyfully and persistently. In contrast, extrinsic motivation involves an external stimulus, such as an incentive. The incentive for doing something lies primarily in the consequences of the action. Extrinsically motivated behavior depends on external impulses and expires when these impulses cease to exist. It is scientifically proven that extrinsic incentives do not only lose their effect quickly, but they also need to be continually increased in order to retain their effect.

Steven Reiss (1947–2016) is considered one of the best‐known motivational researchers in the world. He identified 16 central life motives on the basis of scientific research by questioning more than 25,000 people up to the year 1998. According to the study, 16 basic needs of people can be assigned to certain life motives. The Reiss Motivation Profile (RMP) clearly shows which values and personality traits a person has. The terms values and motives are not congruent. However, they are closely related and mutually dependent. Values are not innate. They are shaped by the environment. Motives, on the other hand, provide important clues to a person's conception of values. Staller and Kirschke, following Frank H. Sauer (https://www.wertesysteme.de/nuetzlicheinfos/frank-h-sauer-uber-werte/) define values as a person's evaluative thoughts and attitudes about important things in life with regard to oneself, friends, or society and how people treat each other (for example, trust, honesty, politeness). Values are a part of one's identity and personality. This is because they also provide information about what is important or unimportant to a person. Unlike motives, values are not innate, but are formed during a person's life as a result of the social environment and the imprinting associated with it. Families, schools, professional life, and the respective immediate environment of a person have an influence on their values. A person's fundamental values will not change significantly after the age of 20.

Knowledge of life motives as well as values and the associated personality traits of a person provide information about factors that make a person decide when and when not to act. This is why life motives are important for one's own management as well as for the management of employees and in dealing with people close to us. Especially if we want to apply the principle of action orientation. If a particular life motive is strongly pronounced, or a certain value has a particularly high priority with a person, they will show a high motivation and willingness to act.

However, people often do not live in harmony with their own values and motives. Eventually, this might lead to burn‐out syndrome and illnesses. Only those who act in harmony with their values, or motives will experience happiness in their professional and private lives in perspective. In my opinion, the dropouts in their 40s or 50s clearly show that their profession was not a calling, but a means to an end. Someone who loves their profession does not drop out. In the case of professionals, I am not aware of any colleagues in my specialty who have left their chosen profession. Nevertheless, there will always be some. I also know colleagues who work for large companies and have contracts that stipulate that they have to stop at a certain age. But many colleagues are often reluctant to quit.

The 16 life motives according to Steven Reiss function as a driving force in the principle of action orientation. Everyone has all of the 16 basic needs. However, Reiss gives them different priorities and claims that he can predict a person's behavior in certain life situations by knowing what priority a person gives to the 16 basic needs and how they combine them. Staller and Kirschke see it the same way and, based on Steven Reiss' life motives, have developed their ID37 Personality Analysis, which – also based on similar 16 life motives – analyzes a person's personality.

Table 6.1 shows the 16 life motives according to Steven Reiss in alphabetical order and describes a low and high level of expression in each case. On one hand, the intensity of the expression indicates how a person is perceived by other people and which characteristics are important to them in connection with their expression. The boundaries can be fluid. There are also more or less strong dimensions within a proficiency. The characteristics are merely exemplary and serve as orientation.

Motives are motivations of individual behavior. They explain why a person acts and are therefore important for the principle of action orientation. Knowledge of one's own central motives in life and their manifestations are an important prerequisite for understanding one's own personality. A person who does not know themselves well will not develop good knowledge of human nature in others either. The characteristics shown in the columns of weak and strong expression serve only as a guide. Because within a weak as well as within a strong expression there are different strong bandwidths of the respective expression. The high number of characteristics shown for the different expressions helps to assess oneself more thoroughly, but also to identify more quickly which life motives other people have.

People act to satisfy their life motives. The different life motives of a person show which priorities someone has in their life and to what extent they desire to satisfy them. Intrinsic motivation arises when someone pursues their personal goals, and they are in harmony with their life motives. The complex interaction of the 16 life motives describes the uniqueness of each person.

There are a number of different test procedures for determining one's own life motives as well as one's own Reiss Profile. These procedures are also available online, although I do not want to make a recommendation for a particular test at this point. Anyone who has passed the age of thirty should be able to recognize for themselves what their dominant life motives are. In particular, the classification of life motives – what is personally important and what is less important – should be done regularly. Someone who, after reading Table 6.1, cannot make their own judgment about their life motives, should indeed then take one of the many tests. This is especially true for young readers.

It is worthwhile to deal with one's own personality. In addition, all professionals who manage employees should be able to get a picture of another person's personality. Following Staller and Kirschke, I summarize the main reasons why it is beneficial to deal with one's own personality:

• Self‐awareness and self‐control
• Learning to understand motivation and behavior
• Learning to classify and regulate emotions
• Understanding others
• Recognizing, avoiding, and solving conflict situations
• Shaping relationships
• Reflective self‐perception and perception of others
• Motivating oneself and not demotivating others

The principle of action orientation is related to the principle of result orientation. Only those who act will achieve results. If we act wrongly, we will achieve the wrong results. On the other hand, if we don't act at all, we could miss many opportunities. The 16 life motives show why people act, or do not act.

In the case of the life motive “curiosity,” the column shows the characteristic “action‐oriented” if it is weak. Accordingly, people for whom the life motive curiosity does not play a key role would be more action‐oriented than for those of us with a strong expression of the life motive curiosity. In my opinion, this is often true. People with a strong expression of the life motive curiosity are indeed mostly intellectual, inquisitive, and thoughtful. However, these are precisely the qualities that keep people from taking action. Those who constantly weigh arguments against each other and focus on the problems instead of the solutions should not be surprised if they end up not acting at all.

Unfortunately, many ideas fizzle out when people fail to act. The principle of action orientation is important if you want to achieve goals. An entrepreneur takes action, as the very name implies. Every action also implies failure. In my practice, I notice repeatedly that analytically driven professions often find arguments that prevent action. In a corporate culture that consists of doubters, it should not be surprising if no action is taken. It is much more important that the risks associated with failure are calculable and manageable. By contrast, anyone who does the right things at the right time will much more likely succeed and move toward their goals.

Someone who is in motion tends to stay in motion. Most people are familiar with the feeling when everything is going really well. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls this phenomenon the “flow state.” In the final phases of large projects, all forces are mobilized. Everyone acts toward the goal in good project management. People who do something every day that moves them toward their goals are ahead of others and are usually more satisfied with themselves than those who do not act in line with their goals, or who don't act at all.