Fundamental Motivation

Most people need motivation to overcome the internal mental struggle that holds them back. This struggle occurs because we desire things that prove impossible to fulfil in the moment. When we desire things that we cannot fulfil we create negative emotions. The type and the depth of the emotion depends upon how great the mismatch is between what we desire and what we prove capable of fulfilling and how difficult it will prove to do the things that will eventually fulfil the desire; the greater the mismatch, the worse the feeling. Deep and painful negative emotions and long-term procrastination occur when we consistently set out to do, to have or to be things that we are woefully inadequate to fulfil. It then becomes very easy to judge ourselves upon what we cannot do so that after a while we feel incapable of doing anything other than the simplest tasks to any degree of satisfaction.

At this point most people feel very blocked and unable to make further progress. They tend to overindulge in easy to fulfil distractions, such as watching TV, surfing the web, playing video games, sleeping, boozing and other such common activities. This trend tends to continue until external factors demand action. This is the common end result of procrastination. For example, if you have an assignment to do for school and yet you don’t feel competent enough to do it well then you procrastinate until the time left available and the demand for a result forces you to do something – normally just enough to get by. In this case the negative consequences of inaction finally build to such a level that action must occur or else a highly unfavourable result will occur. That’s a form of negative motivation where a threat to our well-being generates an impetus to overcome whatever inadequacies or impossibilities we perceived prior to that moment.

However, once you leave school, leave home and get a job the external influences that once forced you to learn and to develop tend to disappear. You either have to take control of your own mind and efforts or else you end up spending most of your free time procrastinating and indulging in distractions. At this point most people think that they need motivation in order to get on with things. That’s either a pull-me motivation (all of the good rewards that can happen from taking action) or else a push-me motivation (all of the bad results that can happen from inaction).

Positive Motivation

The idea behind positive motivation is to induce such a hearty and lusty desire that no obstacles will stand in the way. That can work when a person has a clear and robust process for fulfilling desires, can easily do the preparation needed and has the full competence to fulfil all necessary steps to reach the end result. It can work for someone who feels under-the-weather and simply needs a fillip. However, if a person doesn’t have the necessary abilities then positive motivation doesn’t last long because as soon as “impossible in the moment” realities occur then no amount of feeling good, wishful thinking, exciting anticipation of the end result, gung-ho psyching can overcome practical realities. Thus for people into self-development and seeking to fulfil desires and outcomes that they have never achieved before feel good motivation has very little impact. The reason you need this kind of motivation is because you kept banging up against your limitations and repeatedly attempting to do the personally impossible is the fastest way to feeling recurrently bad about yourself. Pumping yourself up only to bang your head against impossibility once again only serves to make you feel even worse about yourself because you end up creating high expectations that go unfulfilled and the difference between your desire and your ability gets increased by such an expectation. When the objective still proves impossible, as it surely will do since psyching yourself up does nothing to solve the fundamental issue of personal impossibility then you fail to fulfil your even higher expectation and a greater negative emotion is the result. Keep repeating this process and you become desperate and depressed.

Negative Motivation

Negative motivation tends to have a greater real world impact because the element of threat involved is often much more tangible. However, it tends to smack of desperation born out of incompetence and inadequacy and even if we succeed we know that we only scraped through and that we are struggling, acting at the limit of our capabilities with little hope of improvement unless we can gain real insight into what ails us. We will more likely find ways to avoid such situations (such as dropping out, quitting, continual avoidance) rather than accept our inadequacies and resolve to overcome them.

Fundamental Motivation

Our ability to feel good and to do good actions on a consistent basis depends upon two things:

• Setting desires that we have a high possibility and probability of fulfilling. Whenever we fulfil a desire we feel positive emotions. If we set highly sought after desires impossible (or near impossible) and highly improbable to fulfil then we feel negative emotions.
• Preparing and carrying out actions that are personally possible in the moment. Whenever we seek to do things that we really cannot do at the point that we want to do them we face a practical impossibility that leaves us immobilised and frustrated (and we prove unable to fulfil our desire, which makes us feel bad to boot).

No amount of positive motivation or negative motivation can overcome the practical realities of things that are personally impossible (or perceived of as personally impossible) to do in the moment.

If you struggle with “personal motivation” then it happens because you seek to do too much that you cannot do in the moment that you want to do it. That will never change until you make your desires easier to fulfil and until you develop the knowledge, or skills, or methods, or solutions that take you beyond your current limitations.

The following articles go into more detail about issues raised here: extinction-of-the-least-fit – more about motivation from a survival point of view procrastination – more about managing desires and preparing for the possible negative-affirmations – a useful motivating tool when you’ve been struggling for a while supercharge-your-learning-pt1 – a method for homing in on the intricacies of taking “impossible in the moment” desires and making them “possible in the moment” realities.

These links will take you to other parts of the fundamental series:

Part 1: fundamental insights
Part 2: fundamental survival
Part 3: fundamental emotion
Part 4: fundamental desires
Part 5: fundamental growth

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