what motivates you?
Audience: this note is in draft form and will continue to be worked on as I refine my thinking on this topic. I've tagged you in this note because each of you are unique and excel in very specific ways. I'd love to hear your thoughts on developing intrinsic motivation and what deserves to be a labor of love.
Being currently unemployed from structured employment for the first time in many years has given me pause to think about the source of motivation. I'm in the search for that "dream job" ...the job you get after putting in all the hard work, doing the training, getting the degree, going to networking events, taking little side jobs, analyzing job requirements, filling in gaps in one's resume, attending job-related seminars, doing more research on companies, setting up job alerts in search aggregators, tapping networks, going to informational interviews and writing and thinking more about what one really wants out of life anyways... or maybe you were just blessed with luck, beauty, wit, personal skill, having a supportive family, a philosophy of life that kept you aloft or the opposite was true and you faced adversity that gave you a certain amount of adaptability.
And then of course there's all those soft skills: being creative, being analytical, a good writer, communicator, having acumen with people, process, technology or a domain of knowledge..
All these activities basically leads back to motivation which is a basic attribute of successful people. I just keep thinking about motivation both extrinsic (where you fulfill and externally mandated duty like looking for jobs because unemployment tells you to) and intrinsic (where the desire comes from yourself)..I suppose motivation is thus a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic in that from an early age your parents instilled some values, worth ethic, which was reinforced by teachers, professors and society at large (depending on what you were paying attention to) and then solidified through the habit of work or other practice.
In my prior experience of working at UW Medicine, this habit of going to work lasted almost 10 years! the motivation came from the result of years of practice...the ability to perform my duties in a high performing way and the pleasure in being able to do so. I left that employment to go work at Amazon Kindle, while only a contract job was more relevant to my field and gave me a chance to get out of my comfort zone and challenge myself on a number of levels.
Now imagine that anything you habitually did for a long time ended: a relationship, a job, a geographic location (you moved) and you found yourself out of sorts with your new identity. The old habits of work or behavior no longer pertain...what keeps you motivated now? I run into a sort of mental stumbling block when I think about this question. How do you learn to be good at something new? What motivates you to get good at something you weren't good at before? For that matter, what makes you even want to try something you've never been good at before? In my case, I want to learn: how to be part of a larger family context, to get truly healthy for the first time in about 10 years, to participate meaningfully in my new Library and Information Science field. Each of these things alone are challenging for me and I want to learn and practice each as soon as possible.
What I've learned from my friends and observation is that regardless of where you work (professional identity), your relationship, economic, or other status there exists an essential self. Some of my friends will always have an eye for design to make and assemble beautiful things, the decorative arts, some collect massive collections of music, some have an essentially generous nature and dedicate their lives helping others (such as all those folks back at HMC). I'm sure you can think of more examples, but the point is that people that don't fight their true natures become intrinsically motivated to do what they are both good at and love. They perfect what they do through practice.
Being currently unemployed from structured employment for the first time in many years has given me pause to think about the source of motivation. I'm in the search for that "dream job" ...the job you get after putting in all the hard work, doing the training, getting the degree, going to networking events, taking little side jobs, analyzing job requirements, filling in gaps in one's resume, attending job-related seminars, doing more research on companies, setting up job alerts in search aggregators, tapping networks, going to informational interviews and writing and thinking more about what one really wants out of life anyways... or maybe you were just blessed with luck, beauty, wit, personal skill, having a supportive family, a philosophy of life that kept you aloft or the opposite was true and you faced adversity that gave you a certain amount of adaptability.
And then of course there's all those soft skills: being creative, being analytical, a good writer, communicator, having acumen with people, process, technology or a domain of knowledge..
All these activities basically leads back to motivation which is a basic attribute of successful people. I just keep thinking about motivation both extrinsic (where you fulfill and externally mandated duty like looking for jobs because unemployment tells you to) and intrinsic (where the desire comes from yourself)..I suppose motivation is thus a combination of extrinsic and intrinsic in that from an early age your parents instilled some values, worth ethic, which was reinforced by teachers, professors and society at large (depending on what you were paying attention to) and then solidified through the habit of work or other practice.
In my prior experience of working at UW Medicine, this habit of going to work lasted almost 10 years! the motivation came from the result of years of practice...the ability to perform my duties in a high performing way and the pleasure in being able to do so. I left that employment to go work at Amazon Kindle, while only a contract job was more relevant to my field and gave me a chance to get out of my comfort zone and challenge myself on a number of levels.
Now imagine that anything you habitually did for a long time ended: a relationship, a job, a geographic location (you moved) and you found yourself out of sorts with your new identity. The old habits of work or behavior no longer pertain...what keeps you motivated now? I run into a sort of mental stumbling block when I think about this question. How do you learn to be good at something new? What motivates you to get good at something you weren't good at before? For that matter, what makes you even want to try something you've never been good at before? In my case, I want to learn: how to be part of a larger family context, to get truly healthy for the first time in about 10 years, to participate meaningfully in my new Library and Information Science field. Each of these things alone are challenging for me and I want to learn and practice each as soon as possible.
What I've learned from my friends and observation is that regardless of where you work (professional identity), your relationship, economic, or other status there exists an essential self. Some of my friends will always have an eye for design to make and assemble beautiful things, the decorative arts, some collect massive collections of music, some have an essentially generous nature and dedicate their lives helping others (such as all those folks back at HMC). I'm sure you can think of more examples, but the point is that people that don't fight their true natures become intrinsically motivated to do what they are both good at and love. They perfect what they do through practice.
