Motivation

I attended a conference a couple weekends ago and it was focused on fear.  At the end of the presentation the audience was questioned as to what was their greatest fear?  The most consistent answer was failure.

I find this a very odd answer indeed.  If failure is a fear of so many individuals, why is mediocrity so overwhelming.  You would expect to avoid a great fear of failure, the drive to be exceptional would be there indeed.  The answer of course, is that fear is not a good long term motivator.

Fear manifests itself in stress.  Stress leads to anger, resentment and doubt.  All things that are really not conducive or healthy in our life.   So I began to think, well if fear of failure is not a good motivator, then success must be.  Success must be the driving force to motivation.

But this doesn’t seem true either.  Some of my greatest achievements in life have come from huge failures.  Success without failure will not motivate.  Why does walking to the store not seem to drive our motivation to exercise, but signing up for a half marathon will?  The answer is that success that comes too easy seems shallow, unearned and boring.  Alternatively, failure without any success eventually destroys motivation also.

What seems to make most sense then, is that motivation is not the result of either failure, or success, but rather a combination of both. Success does drive motivation, but only after cumulative failure.  This becomes important when we are setting goals for ourselves.  Setting goals that we know are easily achievable will not serve us in the long run.  Setting goals that are extremely difficult is fine, but we have to be really careful to go through a process of self reflection and identify the progress and successes we are making along the way.