The best way to stay motivated at work is to actually care about what you’re doing. Instead of doing the bare minimum, you’re putting in your best effort each time to get the results you want.
The incentive for most people when applying for a job is to survive. This reason alone is potent enough to force anyone to join the rat race and invest years of their lives into corporate ladder climberism.
A narrative to set the record straight
Let’s say you’ve just graduated college. After months of sending out resumes, you finally break into the working world. As a result of the hours you’ve put in, you’ve been getting periodic raises in pay. Over time, you get more than enough money to feed yourself and live comfortably, so the incentive to survive decreases.
In other words, you begin to care less about the risk to your survival.
Eventually you become much more well off than you were a few years back. Everyone around you praises you for your financial prowess. “You’ve come such a long way”, they’ll say. “When are you gonna start a family?”
Then, boom, another incentive. Originally, you took this job as means for survival. But you’ve forgotten that many years have passed since you’ve first achieved employment and you’re getting to that marrying age. surely they can survive on $70K a year, no? Of course, not! What about your children’s college education? No, you need more money. You need to work even harder to make enough money to pay tuition at all the top schools.
Traditional incentives are all around you now, placed in your lap by society. They say it is your duty. Your duty to get married. Your duty to procreate. Your duty to put your offspring through college.
It is your duty, lest you be ostracized by the better half of society.
Fearing this, you go off and do everything you’ve been told. A girl is married. Children are raised. Colleges are paid for. Years pass and these goals are slowly being achieved.
And then one day, the incentives stop. Your children are gone, having left to continue on the cycle. Your wife is with you, tired but happy to finally be free of the war that is raising kids. Your money is more abundant than ever, despite its heavy depletion due to college fees.
And you? Well, you’re the same.
You’re still the same person fresh out of college working towards an end. The same person searching for some sort of incentive to keep him going and stay alive. The young person who has inevitably become bored of life.
You’re soon going to become an old man or woman. You won’t be able get those decades back. But maybe now you can start looking for your passion before it’s too late.
The right incentives
From birth, we are given incentives. It’s in your best interest to cry and complain over and over until your mother gets you that toy you’ve always wanted. It’s in your best interest to go to college so you can get a high paying job and buy stuff. It’s in your best interest to get married and start a family, lest you end up dying alone.
These incentives have been thrust upon you throughout countless generations. This brainwashes us into thinking that this is the right way to live. In reality, though, there is no “right” way to live. There are no “wrong” incentives. There are simply incentives.
The incentives I amused you with in the narrative above, however, demonstrate how incentives that rise from the dregs of society, the ones that have no uniqueness or personal meaning, lead to, unsurprisingly, unfulfilled lives and big question marks.
Instead of going through the motions, it’s imperative that you ask yourself:
Why do I do what I do? To please myself or to please another?
You don’t need permission to live life your own way. You don’t have to get married. You don’t have to have kids. If do you decide to have kids, you don’t have to put them in soul-sucking institutions that only force them to memorize facts and formulas they aren’t interested in.
In truth, the only “right” incentives are the ones you choose for yourself. You decide what you want to achieve in life. Even if you do settle for a high paying job just so you can buy things, it should be your decision. On the other side of the spectrum, you shouldn’t be ashamed of taking a job that others view as less financially rewarding. If you’re doing something you enjoy, no one else’s opinion matters.
I say put off getting married. Have kids later. Save climbing the corporate ladder for when your creative juices stop flowing. Put the goals that aren’t yours into a box labeled “Things to Forget”.
While you’re young, use your energy to work towards something amazing. Something you care about. Something worth staying motivated in.
So the next time you find yourself looking for advice on how to stay motivated in whatever you do, look inside yourself, and ask why and if you really care.
photo credit: Pink Sherbet Photography
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