November 15, 2021!
- Is it the TRUTH?
- Is it FAIR to all concerned?
- Will it build GOODWILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
- Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?
What Is Motivation? (Ryan Holiday)
“There are three areas in which the person who would be wise and good must be trained. The first has to do with desires and aversions – that a person may never miss the mark nor fall into what repels them. The second has to do with impulses to act and not to act – and more broadly, with duty – that a person may act deliberately for good reasons and not carelessly. The third has to do with freedom from deception and composure and the whole area of judgment, the assent our mind gives to our perceptions.” — Epictetus
The ancient Stoic philosophers used the word hormê. It was the impulse that leads to action. It appears thirty-four times in Epictetus’s Discourses, three times in the Enchiridion, and thirty-five times in Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations. Seneca uses the Latin equivalent impetus seventy-nine times in his letters (see Moral Letters 71.32, where he says virtue resides in our judgment, which gives rise to impulse and clarifies all appearances that give rise to impulse).
Motivation, the Stoics say, is the force that drives action. It is the impulse that compels you to do some.
You may have heard of what Steven Pressfield calls the “Resistance”—that voice that questions your abilities, your worth, your sanity. “Any act that rejects immediate gratification in favor of long-term growth, health, or integrity,” Pressfield writes. “Or, expressed another way, any act that derives from our higher nature instead of our lower. Any of these will elicit Resistance.”
We can think of motivation as anything that helps us battle the Resistance. It is the voice that helps us reject immediate gratification. It reminds us to hold out for long-term growth. It is our ally in the pursuit of our higher nature.
Motivation is the force that drives you to get up at 6 AM when you really want to sleep in. It’s the force that drives you to go for a run after work when you’d really rather lay on the couch. Motivation is the reason you’re reading that book. It’s why you journal every morning. It’s how you somehow do a job you don’t particularly like, follow a diet you don’t particularly enjoy, or get through a class you don’t particularly care about. Motivation is the willingness or desire underlying all of those actions and behaviors.