What is MCode? Simply put, MCode is a powerful assessment that identifies your natural motivational patterns and then describes the exact environments in which you'll struggle or thrive — so you can show up at your best every single day.
If you're new to this site, you might wonder, "What is MCode?" In a nutshell, the Motivation Code assessment describes what motivates you when you're at your best.
What is MCode and why do you need it?
When we talk about motivation, most people think of some kind of temporary ‘mojo’ — the kind of feeling you get after watching a TED talk or reading an inspirational book. But after 60+ years of research, the Motivation Code assessment (MCode, for short) tells us that our innate motivations run much deeper.
When you operate in alignment with your natural motivational drivers, you access a different kind of energy — one that doesn't deplete in the same way willpower does. This explains why some tasks leave you energized even after hours of intense focus, while others leave you feeling exhausted after just a few minutes.
This isn't just about finding work you "like" or "enjoy." It's about understanding the specific types of challenges, contributions, and achievements that align with your unique motivational design, so you can experience that state of 'flow' where time seems to disappear and work feels like a natural expression of who you are.
We've all experienced the power of being highly motivated at certain times of our lives. So, why is it that we struggle to articulate what specifically motivates us?
Quick... can you name your top five motivations?
If not, how can you expect to find motivation when you need it most?
That's where the Motivation Code assessment (or MCode, for short) comes in. MCode is the first and only assessment that helps you identify the unique motivational pattern that runs through your personal achievement stories — activities and moments in your life where you felt the most joy, success, and personal satisfaction.
How does MCode work?
The MCode assessment guides you through a three-step reflection and discovery process that takes about 30 minutes to complete.
Step 1: Share your stories
Everything MCode reveals about you is based on your stories. You'll start by sharing a few stories about the most important, meaningful, and satisfying achievements from any part of your life.
Step 2: Answer a few questions
Next, the MCode assessment asks a series of questions about your stories and experiences. You’ll answer questions about how you felt, what you did, what you enjoyed, and why the stories matter, by ranking your answers on a scale of 1-10.
Step 3: Discover your MCode!
With your responses complete, the MCode algorithm applies 60 years of science and data to produce a detailed, highly-personalized report all about you. You’ll discover your unique MCode and how your motivations shape who you are and what you do.
Your MCode report includes a list of 32 different motivations, ranked from most satisfying to least satisfying. It also details how your motivations drive your actions, what energizes and drains you, environments where you'll excel (and struggle), and any blind spots you might want to look out for.
But it doesn't stop there. The full report contains 24 pages of detailed information about how you show up at your best, in addition to a dozen tools that can help you put your MCode results to work in your life right away.
In fact, that's one of the most significant ways MCode is unlike any other assessment you've taken; it doesn't categorize or give you a one-size-fits-all label. Rather, your personalized report is all about how to apply it to your work and home life, so you can see the results for yourself starting today.
Where did MCode come from?
In the early 1960s, a researcher named Arthur Miller Jr. began asking people to tell him stories — not about their failures or struggles, but about times in their lives when they felt the most joy, success, and personal satisfaction.
What he discovered was remarkable.
As he analyzed hundreds of these achievement stories, Miller noticed something that most people miss about themselves: beneath a person's natural strengths, there's an underlying drive that explains why they want to exercise those strengths and how those strengths work together as an integrated system.
He developed a methodical way to mine this achievement data through a process he called the System for Identifying Motivated Abilities — or SIMA©. The unique structure of behavior revealed by this process is what Miller called a "Motivational Pattern" — a recurring design that shows up early in life and remains remarkably stable throughout adulthood.
Here's what makes SIMA different from traditional assessments: it's narrative-based and non-psychometric. It doesn't compare you to norms or sort you into pre-defined categories. Instead, it works with your lived experience — your own stories, in your own language — to reveal the deep motivational patterns that have been driving you all along.
Over the past 60+ years, more than a million achievement stories have been collected and analyzed for hundreds of thousands of individuals. At its peak, 22 licensed consultancies across the U.S. and in England, Sydney, and Amsterdam used SIMA's tools in areas like executive search, leadership coaching, succession planning, and organizational development. The methodology also served more than 600 non-profit organizations, including World Vision, Salvation Army, Compassion International, and World Relief.
Contributors and contemporaries of Miller's work included Richard Bolles (author of What Color is Your Parachute), leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith, and Miller's own family — his sons Kim and Art III, and his grandson Dr. Joshua Miller, who went on to help develop the next chapter of this story.
About a decade ago, the team I now work for built an online assessment based on SIMA that generates a detailed motivational report, which we call your Motivation Code — or MCode, for short.
Since then, we've collected and analyzed over a million achievement stories from people all around the world. And those stories have been mapped to the 32 motivations that drive our behavior, inform our decisions, and propel us to seek out work that is both gratifying and fulfilling.
More than a personality assessment.
Personality assessments categorize your behaviors, preferences, and traits into tidy boxes that help explain how you show up in the world.
Motivation Code reveals something more fundamental: why you do what you do.
This distinction is everything. Your personality might evolve throughout your life, but your core motivational pattern — which is established early and reinforced through your lived experiences — remains remarkably stable. It's the hidden thread that runs through your most fulfilling accomplishments — those moments when you felt the most energized and at your absolute best.
The MCode assessment doesn't just label you into broad categories. It identifies your unique motivational fingerprint from billions of possible combinations, and then describes how you can use your motivational pattern to align your work with how you're naturally wired.
This mind-boggling level of precision allows us to pinpoint exactly which aspects of your work align with your authentic design and which create invisible friction that can lead to burnout and dissatisfaction.
Results you can actually use right away.
Most assessments look to categorize you into broad buckets alongside millions of other people who are just like you. While you may learn some neat insights about yourself, more often than not, you quickly find yourself asking, "Okay, so what? Now what?"
Your Motivation Code isn't just more trivia to collect or another label to wear.
MCode is a practical framework you can use to change your life.
And best of all, it highlights how you are uniquely wired to do incredible things.
When you understand your authentic motivational pattern, you'll gain the ability to:
- Restructure your existing work to minimize friction and maximize flow.
- Make career decisions with clarity about what will truly fulfill you.
- Understand why certain accomplishments feel significant while others feel empty.
- Navigate burnout by addressing its root cause, not just its symptoms.
- Communicate your needs more effectively to colleagues and clients.
- Show up at your absolute best for your team, your family, friends, and yourself.
Your authentic motivational pattern isn't something you work to develop. It's something you uncover. And when you align your life and work with this pattern, everything changes.
If you're ready to discover your unique pattern of motivation, take the MCode assessment today. Then, reach out and let's talk about how you can put it to work in your life to do more of what lights you and less of what doesn't!