Quotes About Motivation

Ask yourself what you would require to be motivated to undertake the job, honestly, and listen to the answer. Don't tell yourself, "I shouldn't need to do that to motivate myself." What do you know about yourself? You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can't even set the clock on your microwave. Don't over-estimate your self-knowledge.

It isn't precisely that people will fight for what they believe. They will fight, instead, to maintain the match between what they believe, what they expect, and what they desire.

I came to understand, through the great George Orwell, that much of such thinking found its motivation in hatred of the rich and successful, instead of true regard for the poor. Besides, the socialists were more intrinsically capitalist than the capitalists. They believed just as strongly in money. They just thought that if different people had the money, the problems plaguing humanity would vanish.

Michelangelo's great perfect marble David cries out to its observer: "You could be more than you are.

The moral of the story? Beware of intellectuals who make a monotheism out of their theories of motivation.

Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power.

Your inaction, inertia and cynicism removes from the world that part of you that could learn to quell suffering and make peace.

The fact that power plays a role in human motivation does not mean that it plays the only role, or even the primary role ... Beware of single cause interpretations--and beware the people who purvey them.

To do something, you have to VALUE something. It is a definitional issue. Because, to DO something, is to ACT OUT the proposition that the thing you are doing, the thing you are AIMING at, let's say, is PREFERABLE to the thing you have. And preferable means that you will do it.

People motivated to make things better usually aren't concerned with changing other people—or, if they are, they take responsibility for making the same changes to themselves (and first).

We are not happy, technically speaking, unless we see ourselves progressing—and the very idea of progression implies value.

Anything that interferes with such attainment (little old ladies with canes) will be experienced as threatening and/or punishing; anything that signifies increased likelihood of success (open stretches of sidewalk) will be experienced as promising or satisfying. It is for this reason that the Buddhists believe that everything is Maya, or illusion: the motivational significance of ongoing events is clearly determined by the nature of the goal toward which behavior is devoted

Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.

Someone assigned a pointless or even counterproductive task will deflate, if they have any sense, and find within themselves very little motivation to carry out the assignment. Why? Because every fiber of their genuine being fights against that necessity.

Now, an idea is not the same thing as a fact. A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. It has no consciousness, no will to power, no motivation, no action. There are billions of dead facts. The internet is a graveyard of dead facts. But an idea that grips a person is alive. It wants to express itself, to live in the world. It is for this reason that the depth psychologists—Freud and Jung paramount among them—insisted that the human psyche was a battleground for ideas.

We do the things we do because we think those things important, compared to all the other things that could be important. We regard what we value as worthy of sacrifice and pursuit. That worthiness motivates us to act, despite the fact that action is difficult and dangerous.

Jordan B. Peterson

He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

Maybe you are a loser. And maybe you're not—but if you are, you don't have to continue in that mode.

As the great nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, "He whose life has a why can bear almost any how."61

Skinner observed the animals he was training to perform such acts with exceptional care. Any actions that approximated what he was aiming at were immediately followed by a reward of just the right size: not small enough to be inconsequential, and not so large that it devalued future rewards. Such an approach can be used with children, and works very well.

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, "He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

He whose life has a why can bear almost any how."61

Incompetent and corrupt intellectuals thrive on such activity, such games. The first players of a given game of this sort are generally the brightest of the participants. They weave a story around their causal principle of choice, demonstrating how that hypothetically primary motivational force profoundly contributed to any given domain of human activity.