Motivation

What motivates people? This question applies to our lives on a multitude of levels: minute to minute, day to day, and life to death. As intelligent creatures, we have the capacity to incline ourselves to perform the mundane, necessary tasks required of us like cleaning the house, mowing the lawn, et cetera, but sometimes there is absolutely no incentive to continue. Take my part-time web work for example: I work at home doing simple web PHP/MySQL jobs. I generally find the work I complete satisfying, but the work itself is lonesome and boring. Human interaction is an incentive to do better in the eyes of others and without that, I feel abject and unwilling to really get a job done. Work for the sake of work is not fulfilling.

In school, I take pride in doing my best relative to the other students (the word relative being key). There are times when expectations of professors outweigh the relative part of that statement, synergies driving me to perform even better. This motivation is almost unconscious for me, and thus very appealing. School is easy. Having recognition for intelligence and excellent performance drives my scholastic success, and I’m sure that will never cease.

Work, however, has always felt more like a roller coaster simply because I have never had any real motivation. Higher pay works for a time but quickly wanes. Praise keeps me going for a while but dies away. Personal satisfaction in my work is probably the best qualifying driver similar to my scholarly motives, but as work requires so much down time taking care of the red tape and bureaucracy, miniscule moments are devoted to seeing the light of a finished project. Teamwork would go a long way to solving this stigma I currently have. I work in teams all the time at school, each partner contributing a valuable part to the whole, resulting in a wonderful mix that allows each to excel beyond his/her individual potential. As a small operation, however, I do not have a team, so I must zero in on other solutions.

What I really need is a new level of impetus to supersede work altogether—a new force to incite me to finish work for the day so that I might return home to it. I do not think that I will extrapolate as to what that might be, but you see my point. (Ironically enough, I experienced a huge Freudian slip in that last sentence before correcting it.) Riding the bike has some of this quality, but I desire something more mindful. Anyway, I digress.

I have so much to do, yet I feel as though I accomplish little. Perhaps my unsatisfied mind simply craves greater challenges, which are coming to be sure. The easy life just isn’t enough, and I tempt for harder things to come.