Motivation

Everyone has something to help drive them. It isn’t always easy to figure out what keeps you going. In fact, I’d venture to say that most people spend a great deal of their life looking for it. There always seems to be a great deal of difficulty in deciding what “it” is. Even worse is the likelihood that a person won’t even realize they have something driving them and will pass right over it looking for the next thing that catches their fancy.

So far in my life I’ve come across three primary motivators that I feel push me. These three prime motivators could even be said to have kept me alive. In no particular order; I’d say love, music, and curiosity keep me going.

Love is probably the most obvious motivator many of us feel. It is also often the first motivator we experience growing up. No matter your relationship with your family, everyone had someone love them at some point. It’s human nature to foster relationships and one of many things that make us a social species. Wherever love comes from, it always pushes us in some way.

Of my three motivators, I imagine music is the least universal. Music can be many things to many different people. It can evoke emotion or thought like almost nothing else humanity has produced. I was lucky to grow up in a family that appreciated a wide variety of musical styles. I was even luckier in the fact that I had the opportunity to study it for years as an adolescent. For me, the discovery of the endless possibilities music holds will always be intimately tied to my younger (and more troublesome) years.

The last on my list, curiosity, is yet another common motivator for much of humanity. We are never satisfied with what we know or have experienced. There is always another frontier to look towards. Until we know everything there is to know, you can be sure someone is curious about something. (Although, at that point I imagine someone will at least be curious of what it would be like to not know everything.)

For me, these three motivators are tied together and in a way not all that different from each other. As much as we attempt to break down any of these three topics and study them in a scientific manner, we don’t understand them. Curiosity is why science exists in the first place. People are only now trying to scientifically understand why music speaks to us the way it does. When it comes to love, I’m sure anyone who has experienced it can tell you they don’t understand it.

One of the most peculiar things about love is that you can’t really love someone without hating them. That dislike or hate you feel for someone you love shows that you care. You could even argue that generalized hate about someone you don’t care about is you caring for humanity or life in its entirety. I still don’t understand why my family has to worry about me the way they do. I just chalk it up to their love for me.

As for music, I believe it might be a higher form of communication than language or writing. Different methods of received communication affect our thoughts in different ways. When we read text, it affects us differently than when conveyed through language. I don’t know about you, but music can affect me on a much deeper level than any other form. I have no idea why or how, but I’m convinced there is more going on than we understand.

Curiosity changes as generations “master” more and more knowledge. Once a generation feels it understands something, many people push the envelope even further. There aren’t a whole lot of people still working on expanding human knowledge on the topic of buoyancy, for instance. We have a general understanding of it so while there is likely more to learn about it, it is probably more worthwhile spending time and effort in understanding more pressing matters at the heart of human curiosity.

Simply put, you could say my prime motivation is my drive for understanding. It isn’t easy to work out why you do the things you do though it can be a useful personal exercise to try. It seems to be even more difficult to understand them, but then if we understood, we wouldn’t be as driven as we are to move forward. The day we understand everything is the day we stand still.