What is motivation?

There is no one best reward to get us motivated. You need to consider what motivated you best last time. Did you just do it because you wanted to and now they are paying you and you have to do it even if you don’t feel like it?

It doesn’t matter whether the motivation to do something is intrinsic or extrinsic. Intrinsic motivation is doing something because you want to and extrinsic is being motivated by something like a reward, being made salesman of the year, winning a medal for first place, or having your name put on an honour role.

Yet rewards like these have been known to backfire too. Not because the reward isn’t desirable but the pressure it creates to perform and other negative feelings, like do I deserve this just because I can do this so easily. I love doing this it’s too easy, I don’t deserve the reward. It should go to someone who “earned” it.

We probably even sabotage ourselves because we don’t consciously know all our beliefs and why we stop ourselves from doing what we know needs to be done in order to achieve something. Our feelings about the reward can be the barrier. Like knowing we have the potential to earn thousands of dollars every week and yet we don’t take action. We don’t even do the little things we know will allow us to reach the reward. Because we have a script going that won’t allow us to earn more… more money than our parents, more money that would make us rich and evil at the same time, more money than our friends (so we know they are our friends not after our money). The number of reasons are infinite.

That’s why procrastination is stopping us. We don’t know the script that is stopping us and if we do we do our best to hide it from ourselves. We don’t want to admit the reason we don’t earn more money is because we don’t want to be richer than our parents.

We don’t want to study hard put a lot of effort into our assignment and wind up getting a failing grade anyway. We do the minimum because it leaves us the safety net of saying well of course I only got a C I didn’t put enough time into the essay. I wrote it the night before it was due. If I did a bit more research I could have done better. But if we gave 100% and only got a C, what then? It’s like saying I’ll always only be average no matter how much effort I put in so why bother?

As long as we look at the horizon wishing we could reach the horizon we are never going to get there. Our journey isn’t measured by how far we still have to go but how far we’ve come since the last time we looked back. To reach the moon we don’t measure how far we still have to go without measuring how far we have travelled away from earth. The horizon keeps moving ahead staying tantalizing and frustratingly our of our reach. Chunk down. Look for a mile stone that is closer to where you are standing now. Tag that one and then look for the next one further on in the destination.

A journey of 1000 steps begins with a single step. But it is only finished as you put each of those steps behind you, one by one.