The Future Reward: A discussion of personal motivation
You use your personal motivation to strive and work so hard for something only to not see the pay off.
Everyone tells you, “You can’t always succeed,” or, “Try again. You’ll get it next time,” but try as hard as you might, you never see that light at the end of the tunnel; you never reach that success point.
Because your motivation is in the wrong place.
Don’t just work to get paid. Don’t just slave away at that weekend consulting gig to make a little more money. Don’t just run to lose weight. Don’t just do something so that you can reach the end of it.
Because once you do reach the end, you have a choice.
Stop doing it and give up all of what you’ve worked for except maybe bragging rights or struggle to reach a new end point. As soon as you stop, you acknowledge that what you worked so hard for was “okay for a time,” but not really what you wanted to be spending your time on. Or, if you pick a new goal, you’re just setting yourself up to feel like you’re in the middle of a struggle, as if you can never really get to the end.
The end of the year is a long way off.
But, starting thinking now about what you want to do in the new year that you really love and what you want to stop doing because you’re only waiting for that sometime future reward that may never come.
Good stuff P’. To be honest, I’m not a big fan of New Year resolutions. They almost make no sense to me at all. What I mean is why wait to make a change that has been eating at you? All of us get promptings, but the real question is what do we do with said promptings? Do we listen, or continue to put off? Heck , maybe I’ll just have to write a blog post on this subject
Anyway, thanks for what you do brother.
Oh, man. I’m so gonna rip you up on your new year resolutions post
Just kidding of course.
I wrote out a lengthy response to why I used to agree with your take, but I don’t anymore, so you’ll see more in the next post.
But basically, yes, you shouldn’t wait. You should act. However, for many of us, points in time stand as mile markers that allow us to say, “When I hit this point, I’ll do X,” and, “I did X when I was Y years old.”
More to come…