One thing which I keep thinking crosses my head often is what exactly motivates people. A few common things which I've seen which motivate people is money and fame. Money could be a good motivating factor when it comes to either uplifting your own situation, getting access to resources which you never had before or trying to do things which you really wanted to but you couldn't for some reason. It is also just something symbolic about money itself which seems very appealing.
People usually consider money to be a huge motivating factor, which it is, I’m not denying that. But more and more, I’ve noticed another, less visible factor in people that motivates them. It’s hard to articulate, something not so obvious or latent. We could reduce it to experience: maybe they met someone during undergrad, met someone at a coffee shop, or met a friend who really inspired them. But that sounds almost unreal, right? Like, how can you meet someone and suddenly become very motivated?
So I keep trying to understand this more deeply. Is it something fundamental to being human, where we change our perspective after meeting certain people? Maybe we realize that being around these kinds of people is what motivates us. Or is it about becoming like them that’s motivating? You see people, not exactly idols, but people who are more comfortable, more settled, more aware, more interesting?. And it’s not the money that excites you; it’s the affinity of being around such people. Having a community, essentially, could be motivating. But there’s a third thing, and this is trickier.
I’ve met a lot of PhD students or people who are into a field who are very passionate about their work, and often that passion didn’t emerge in high school or a decade ago. It’s something they became passionate about over a short span of time, say one to three years. How does that really happen? Some people might say discipline; others might attribute it to repetition. But how do you know when you were motivated enough to do that thing? Is it by talking to people who are already interested in it? Is it by realizing something about yourself that you didn’t know before?
Is it something fundamental within us that we don’t really know about, and once we realize it, it becomes extremely motivating and attractive to us? We observe patterns in what we’ve done over different spans of time whether that’s meeting people, understanding how we perceive things, trying many different things. That’s another way people figure out what motivates them. But I’m still unsure. Is it really just people meeting other people? And if that were true, what about those who spend 80 or 90 percent of their lives at home?