Cover of Drive Force: The Physics of Human Motivation, by Dane Sandy

DRIVE FORCE · THE BOOK · NOVEMBER 2026

Motivation is not a personality trait. It is an equation.

Every motivation book tells you what to do. This one tells you what is broken.

Four variables decide whether you start anything: Expectancy, Value, Impulsivity and Delay. A fifth, Anti-Value, is the one the original research missed. Drive Force shows you how to measure each of them, find the one that is failing, and fix that one instead of trying harder at everything.

M = (E × V) / (I × D)

One email, in November. Nothing else unless you ask for it.

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THE AUTHOR

Dane Sandy trained as a mechanical engineer and builds software. He wrote Drive Force after noticing that every book on motivation told him what to do, and not one told him what was broken. The model is built on Piers Steel and Cornelius König's Temporal Motivation Theory (2006), extended with a term for the pull of what we are moving away from.