What Motivates Me?

This is the most essential thing in life, in my opinion. It’s what shapes our future. Everyone is motivated by something, we just need it to be clear and concise for it to drive us.

Everything that motivates someone in one category can be applied to another category, that is what I believe to be a true motivator. It’s ok to have more than one thing that motivates you, but I like just having one that can be spread among different aspects of life. For my brain, it keeps things simple.

I always think that the fear of failure is what motivates me to keep doing the things I do. I hate failing. I hate the feeling of failing. I especially hate thinking I am a failure. I work so hard, not for praise as the endgame, but to avoid the potential negative result that comes when things don’t done. That is especially true in a work setting, whether it’s not getting something done in time, or screwing up a scheduled event, etc.

As for aspects of my life, it’s especially important. From a fitness standpoint, I love to run and it’s such a benefit to me that I’m very self-driven to go out and run, even though I’m not doing it with a competitive goal in mind. However, I can be very lazy about it sometimes and that’s tough. I never want to get into the habit of shortening my workouts because then I don’t see the gain from it. I just see someone who just wants to get through it and check it off their list for the day. That’s not what I want. I want the workout to be worth it and enjoyable, not tiring and unbearable. I don’t want to fail myself.

I think, most important of all, I would never want to fail my friends and family. There are just so many tenets to what makes you a good friend or good family member I try, to the best of my abilities, to follow them. However, nobody’s perfect and things do more or less go wrong. That’s tough because you feel as if you let down everyone’s expectations or general impressions of your character. It’s hard to recover from that. I try to be as helpful as possible, without asking anything in return because, with friends and family, there is no “You owe me”. Or should there be?

Motivation is key. That is what I try to remind myself from time to time. It’s so vague and open to interpretation, but that’s what makes it so effective.