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The Top 10 Things that Make Us Tick
Paperback
Series: Top Shelf, Book 9
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Nov 1 2025
Pages: 90
Weight: 0.29
Height: 0.19 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In Mark Twain's most famous scene, Tom Sawyer is told to whitewash thirty yards of fence on a perfect Saturday. By the afternoon his friends have paid him for the privilege of doing it for him. Tom had stumbled on a great truth about people: what we do depends less on the task than on what it means to us.
The Top 10 Things that Make Us Tick takes ten of the motives that drive human behaviour, curiosity, security, power, connection, recognition, freedom, novelty, purpose, fear and hope, and sets each one beside the best research and the best stories we have.
Why did baby monkeys cling to a cloth mother who gave them no milk? Why did a twelve-year-old's essay give a Mars rover its name? Why did the people of one small Pennsylvania town seem protected from heart attacks? What really happened in the famous Hawthorne factory experiments, and why did economists who found the lost data call the popular account entirely fictional?
Along the way you will meet Viktor Frankl, who carried his search for meaning through the camps, George Mallory, whose Because it's there may have been a reporter's paraphrase, and James Stockdale, who explained why the optimists did not make it out of a prison camp. You will find out why Maslow never drew his famous pyramid, why power posing did not survive testing, why too much choice is less of a problem than you have heard, and why the Pandora story was never about a box.
Every chapter ends with small, practical things to try this week, and a closing section grades the evidence honestly, from the strong and well established to the plain wrong, with a list of famous quotations that turn out to be misquoted.
This second edition has been fully rewritten. Every fact, figure and quotation has been checked against named sources, which are listed at the back of the book.
Lively, curious and grounded in evidence, The Top 10 Things that Make Us Tick is for anyone who has ever wondered why people, themselves included, do what they do.
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