The ultimate triad of Motivation, Sacrifice and Reward!

One of the main problems we face is the short lived life of motivation. Motivation tends to die out quickly, doesn’t it?

Perhaps the answer lies in understanding the very nature of it. Motivation is more like a spark for ignition, than actual combustion of an engine. We need ignition to start a car, but is it enough to drive? No, it isn’t. We have to understand that there has to be more than just ‘motivation’ to get from point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ in life.

We, humans, have made great advances in training the dog to do the most sophisticated actions we desire. Perhaps, training a dog could be a perfect example to understand our troubled relationship with motivation! How are dogs trained? While most dog expert trainers can actually entice dogs into a particular action, to begin with, even regular people know the little trick. Let the dog act in the given set of environment and reward it only for the action it does, which we want it to do. Do that a couple of times and Voila! You have already taught him the first desired behaviour. And if you want to entice it for complex actions, simply increase the reward. It only gets easier to train it further.

Now, what does that have to do with us humans? In fact, we all know what sort of actions are going to get us where we wish to. This means we are in a better position to train than the dogs! The only problem that stays is, that WE DON’T!

There is yet another aspect of motivation that we can identify from our experiences. A cup of hot chocolate is more than enough for a kid to entice into doing an activity but the same hot chocolate won’t work for an adult for even a simple job as bringing a glass of water. What does that tell us? The same reward could mean different to different people! The value structures are different for everyone, and so are the sacrifices.

A person who loves to gulp down a couple of beers after a week’s hard work attaches a certain meaning to both, the activity and the reward. But if he decides to undertake an activity that requires more effort than normal and much more time than a week; say maybe 3 weeks – and he decides to ‘sacrifice’ his beer for 3 weeks and instead go for a full-fledged party on the 4th, i.e. after completion of his goal, he’d be unstoppable. And why would that be? It is because of the sacrifice he’s willing to make!

Now the point here is not to encourage gulping down ‘n’ number of beers, but rather to identify the reward-sacrifice relationship!

Sacrifice really bolsters your motivation. And it always has to be of the activity or thing you love. Only then, it would mean more to you.

Now there, be careful… yet another subtle point is to note that you have to know the timespan you are willing to sacrifice for. If our beer-man simply decides to not drink a beer ‘until life gets better’, well then that won’t work a tiny bit. Not unless he has an even greater accomplishment that suits such a sacrifice.

We do know ourselves better. What turns us on and what we love. If we are entirely convinced and can see which activity or action is going to work best for us in the long term, then it’s only a matter of deciding the level of temporary sacrifice and reward to set for ourselves.

Only creating schedules don’t work because we never attach a meaning to the activities inside the schedule. Another reason is we never set a timeline or even a deadline to the schedule, which in turn only ensures that it becomes unrealistic to follow.

If we create a plan, attach a meaning to every activity of it and are willing to do the appropriate sacrifice till the end of the timeline, there is a definitely higher probability of sticking and achieving what we want.

You do know that it’s worth it, don’t you?