Motivation

“3 more meters and I reach the top! .... Wow, what an achievement. I am going to make it this time! I am going to put this stone at the top of the mountain without it rolling back down. I know I can do it. I can feel it”. Sisyphus thought to himself watching the sun going down on the green mountains.?

“Yes, I failed in each one of the last 1,542 times, but it doesn’t mean a thing! I have learned from my failures, and I know how to do this much better now…. There is something to wish for and I know that today is the day. The day of my success” thought while wiping the sweat off his face.?

Let’s talk a bit about motivation. There is no doubt that if we had to choose the person having the highest level of motivation on the face of the earth, Sisyphus would have been that person.?

In each and every one of us there is a little Sisyphus who is going daily through a process which is not easy for him. A process with repetition which makes us feel it doesn’t progress us anywhere.?

In our lives, we are going through, every day, many un-simple processes, some are short, some are longer, all of them require from us a lot of effort, energy, time, patience, careful thought, struggling, understanding, internalization and containment.?

How do we succeed to find the strength to move these processes mainly in moments it seems nothing is moving, nothing is going as we expected, when we realize that it is going to be much longer and much more tiring than was planned.?

(You can probably imagine what Sisyphus felt waking up every morning seeing the rock he rolled up the mountain the day before, lying beside him at the bottom of the mountain….)?

It is probably connected to motivation.?

Come to think about it, what is motivation??

Motivation is the force, the energy, the drive that makes us get up in the morning, every morning, and give 150% of ourselves and then, go and increase…..?

Motivation is that something that doesn’t allow us to quit, to give up.?

Motivation is that something that makes the difference.?

There are many things that create motivation. It is subjective and different from person to person. Having said that, we could try and find some reasons that create motivation that are common to all of us….. Let’s try and figure them out.?

I would like to start with a question:?

Do women have more motivation than men? Does gender have any influence on different levels of motivation? Well, something to think about….. Good subject for research.?

Motivation is in everyone and is for everyone. Let’s go into some points regarding creation of motivation.?

Optimism:?

The ability to see the full half of the glass.?

Being positive mainly when the environment is not.?

To know from within that all is OK and is going to get better even if now it doesn’t look like it.?

And mainly, because the alternative (being pessimistic), is just much less fun…..?

Meaning:?

We try to give a meaning to many things in our lives. When we succeed, we invest in trying to keep the meaningful things in our lives, to protect them, to nourish them and to grow them.?

We absorb the strength to keep on going out of the meaning, no matter the size of it.?

When there is no meaning, there is no effort, no existence, and no expectancy.?

Creation:?

Creation is a basic feature existing in every human being.?

When we create, we grow and evolve; we fill ourselves with Self-fulfillment, satisfaction, and self-gratification.?

When we create, it fills us with the energy to keep on going. That is the motivation.?

Think for a moment about Michelangelo while he was painting the Sistine Chapel…. 16 years of daily hard work, sometimes Sisyphean…. What gave him the strength to keep on going? What drove him? I can guess that among other things it was the joy of creation… (And maybe the fear of the consequences if he will not finish his job….)?

Payment:?

I think this is the most basic way to create motivation among us. We motivate ourselves to do a good job in order to be paid for it, so we will have the means to live. This way to create motivation works in a Diminishing returns curve, meaning that at some point, even if we grow the payment, the amount of motivation will not grow. And we can see a lot of examples in which, people that are well paid, are not motivated from their payment but from other elements.?

Challenge:?

There is nothing like a good challenge to motivate us…. That top of the mountain needed to be concord…. That feeling which holds our body while we set ourselves to the mission when the wheels in our brain turn faster and faster….?

That feeling we have about a new challenge we have never faced before.?

The willingness to take out of ourselves 150%, discovering new areas and abilities in us we did not know before.?

To surprise ourselves and our surroundings (and that’s another reason that creates motivation).?

The challenges don’t have to be big and highly meaningful; they could be small and daily, as long as they are realistic.?

When the challenge is there, the motivation is there.?

Pride, acknowledgment, and recognition:?

We all have an ego; we nourish it during our lives in various ways, we find all those things that make us proud of ourselves and we look for the acknowledgment and recognition from the environment we live in for our doing.?

Receiving acknowledgment and recognition is a huge catalyst to create motivation.?

Recognition can do wonders.?

Recognition creates role models and the aspiration to be like them.?

Recognition is very important as long as it doesn’t go to our heads….. so, the right amount is essential.?

Competition:?

Not all of us are competitive, or should I say that not all of us are aware of how competitive we are….. the need to win, to be better than others, to be the first, creates the motivation to give our utmost and a bit more…..?

This leads me to a small item which I call:?

Intoxication of power:?

When pride goes overboard, when the body is infected with hubris…when a person gets used to the acknowledgment and the recognition and like with any drug, wants more and more of it as the amount he used to get is just not enough anymore…. One gets to the stage of intoxication of power. At this stage, the person is blind to its surroundings. All he cares about is publicity, power, control, acknowledgment, and recognition.?

Just imagine how powerful this stage in creating motivation is. Think about all the dictators in history, what drove them to do what they have done. (And some had done terrible things the mind can’t even understand and digest). Think about the amount of motivation they had to have, the ability to keep on doing what they have done and for long periods of time….?

This is the intoxication of power.?

Identity and belongings:?

The knowledge of who we are, where we belong to, the feeling that we are part of something important and bigger than us. All of these create motivation while we try to strengthen our connection to the group and to ourselves and try to understand why we are so important.?

The feeling of belonging to a group, either in our working lives or in our private lives creates motivation and allows us to grow and evolve.?

Ownership:?

“This is mine”, “I did this”, “this project is my baby”. The sense of ownership creates motivation, motivation to keep the ownership, to “grow the child” and to grow along with it.?

Let’s go back for a minute to our friend Sisyphus. Its very well might be that what motivated him eventually was his naivety, maybe boredom or maybe the sense of destiny. …. Who knows…. Anyway, till the end of times, he will be considered as the ultimate analogy for all those things in our daily life that repeat over and over again, giving us no joy…. Those tasks we would have been happy to find ourselves without if we could, but at the same time, these are those tasks we find the strength daily to keep on doing them in the best way possible…. Finding in ourselves the motivation!?

So, next time you find yourself doing the same task again, repeating that same ritual, getting to the bottom of the mountain again, even though you have reached the top before, try and figure out what motivates you, what creates the motivation in you to do it again and again and how it evolves you, grow you and enable you to reach new mountain picks and higher records.?

Best of luck!

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