Multifaceted Motivation

Motivation is a tricky thing. When I was younger, I often would do the "bare minimum" required of me. Homework assignment? Whatever the barest amount of work was necessary was all I would commit. Doing chores? Exactly the number of tasks I was assigned and no more.

My mom insisted at the time that I was being lazy. To be truthful, until I became a father, I thought I was too.

Now I know better.

See, my son very clearly shares this trait with me. His most common retort when tasked with something is, "Do I have to?" In fact, he asked it so often, and with such obnoxious inflection, that we had to ban the phrase in our household.

Here's the thing; he's not lazy, and neither am I. We just have a low tolerance for tasks that are set for us by others. And this challenging aspect of my own nature plagued me until I was a fully-independent adult.

I am attempting to help him avoid that fault.

After all, life is filled with tasks we must complete that we don't set for ourselves. School, work, relationships...every facet of life is filled with required compromises of our time, energy, and attention.

Yet it can be difficult to find much pleasure or reward in the mundane, yes? Even more so if you recognize that the meaning of life is whatever you make of it. Nothing matters, in the abstract sense, except the things we choose to care about. So how does one find motivation for the mundane repetition that is day-to-day life?

I'd be lying if I said I had a complete answer to that question. It may sound like a simple thing, but to me at least, it isn't. I'm certain that my son is going to ask me though, so I continue to ponder it at length.

Personally, I motivate myself not by chasing what I want, but by fleeing what I don't. You may think me craven, but I've found that chasing desires becomes rapidly unfulfilling. Like a dog that finally catches a car, it's impossible to know what to do with it once you have it.

But fleeing the undesirable...now that contains a lifetime of possibility. You can't always know what you do want. But there will always be something you don't.

Will that hold true for him? Will it help him achieve success by his own definition? Or will he find that perspective unsatisfying and unacceptable?