The 3 Strongest Human Desires
The first motivational speech I ever remember hearing was my sophomore year of high school. The speaker was old with a shiny bald head and a ruggedly tough exterior. He was a World War II veteran and talked about things like “Panzer Tank Units” of which I had only a vague understanding. Yet he also exuded an inner peace and air of deep caring. As if he had lived and seen it all and realized that what matters is not how we project ourselves, but how we care for others. When he would look right at me I could see this care deeper than the hardened exterior, and it moved me.
His talk was on the three strongest human urges, the first two I’ll gloss over and are pretty obvious with a few seconds thought; (1) the will to stay alive and (2) the desire to procreate so that the human species stays around. These, I’m guessing, are pretty universal among life — in some form or another. They genetically encoded in living things.
The third may be more selective to humans, though. As the D.H. Lawrence poem goes;
I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself.
(3) Is the desire to give up when the going gets tough. To give up. When life isn’t going our way, to escape or just throw in the towel. Hard to disagree that this isn’t, at times, a part of the human condition. We’ve all quit at something before. We’ve all been there.
But we’ve also all gotten up. “Fall down 7 times get up 8” is a Japanese proverb that encapsulates life. Here’s what I’ve learned in 2024 that is a derivation of this. “We are at are strongest when we are our weakest.”
How could that possibly be true, at face value it’s oxymoronic? But what I mean is this. If you want to quit but don’t, you are building resilience. This has considerable psychological grounding in multiple interventions including Stress Inoculation Therapy, which is the process of overcoming smaller stresses the aggregation of which builds up coping mechanisms to larger stresses that arise. A simple example would be if you and a partner break up. Each time you want to check their social media page, say Instagram, and do not you are building resilience. The best book I have ever read on this is Michael Easter’s Comfort Crisis. If you want a read for 2025 that could potentially change your life, this would be one.
The second Friday of January is called “Quitter’s Day” — the most common day people want to give up on their resolutions. This is where science meets human experience — including Easter’s, mine and millions of others. The day you want to quit the most is the day of your greatest growth potential. It’s cold. It’s wet. There’s a million reasons to not go out and run. Or sit down and write. Or spend more time with your kids outside. The list is endless.
And that’s when you do it. That’s when you get in the car, drive to the mountain and hike it. Want to know what this did for me? Here is 3 minutes of a somewhat viral talk I gave on this if you want a bit more. To the new year, here’s to being our strongest and best selves when we need ourselves the most.