The paper argues that the wish to pioneer and innovate is essential if talented persons are to give their best to society. The paper reports the relationships between the pioneering-innovating and five other motives, namely, growth, effectiveness, conscientiousness, status, and safety, for a sample of 750 Indian professionals, and relationships between these motives and environmental characteristic, long term career choices, fluency, blockage, initiative, etc., for smaller samples of professionals. The paper also presents some intriguing data on the differences in correlations between the six motives under conditions of high and low conflict among motives. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings for the nurturance of talent.