On motivation

Let's be honest, "motivation" sucks. Have you ever seen one of those rappers who gets rich singing about how they got rich? That’s pretty much the gist of motivation works or self-help books or ‘get rich’ schemes. You get rich by teaching people how to get rich and offer yourself as an example. See the paradox? So you tell people they are going to get rich by following your recipe, they pay you to find out and you take the money and offer back the story of what just happened. You are basically selling them the product (a recipe for success), while the product is not even done yet. This sounds more like a scam than a recipe for success (although the two are not mutually exclusive).

Now, imagine for a second that you are not selling a recipe for success through motivation, but a recipe for backing cakes. If you’ve never baked a cake before and are not baking a cake while selling the recipe, people aren’t going to buy it, because it would be obvious that you have no idea how to bake a cake. If you charge them money for your recipe on how to make a cake, and by the time they’re done reading it there is a cake that you made and is delicious, they will expect to get an equally good cake by following your recipe. Now, what if the cake that you made is actually better than the one they made following the same recipe? You could say that they need more practice and sell them a different set of recipes on how to bake in general. You would not say a thing if, for example, the recipe you used to bake your cake is different from the one you sold to them. So how would they test if the recipe is the same?

Well, in the case of cakes it’s quite easy. You just ask the author of the recipe to bake following his own recipe to the letter, and ask a different person, who had never baked before, to do the same thing. In the case of cakes, the outcomes should be roughly the same, and it is possible to compare them because there are clear and measurable quantities of everything that goes into baking a cake, from amount of flower to consistency of dough, to the time spent in the oven. In the case of success, however, there is always room for criticizing those who try but cannot seem to get it right. In the case of success, there are no means of testing if the recipe is applied correctly. If the outcome matches the expectations, then it is stated as fact that the recipe works. If it does not, the matter is turned into an issue of insufficient commitment or practice. Telling people that success or lack thereof is their fault is a brilliant way to sell them advice for success and to do it consistently. All they have to do is believe that the recipe works and they will go whatever lengths you prescribe to perfect the recipe you are selling them. It is the same as telling someone who has never baked before that mixing the right amounts of dirt and water for the right amount of time will make the dough. If they believe it, they will try as many times as instructed, blaming themselves for not getting the recipe right, especially if one of the main points of the recipe is to keep trying and never give up.

Offering a recipe for certainty of success IF attempted a sufficiently large number of times is akin to the experiment with the monkey and the typewriter. Of course, if the monkey types for an eternity it will eventually produce the complete volumes of Shakespeare! But you don’t have an eternity or even close to it. What you have is a limited amount of time on this Earth that you cannot afford to waste chasing dreams especially by using tools that see profit from the chase, not the catch. The whole point of a recipe is not that it works out as intended‚ eventually and only if you try hard enough and keep insisting. The point of a recipe is that it will yield the same result guaranteed every time. Would you buy a cookbook that tells you that you need to figure out for yourself how to turn what’s in your fridge into a cake? How about if it assured you that it is confident you will succeed eventually if you really want to and really keep mixing your ingredients together and trying things out? Of course you wouldn’t! So why would you rely on motivational or self-help or ‚get rich’ stuff that tells you basically the same thing?

Let's assume, for the sake if argument, that the model for getting success based on motivation and persistence is really effective. What if it really works?.

Well, how can you test that it does?. It is not possible to measure commitment to a cause as easily as the ingredients for baking a cake. There is no way to numerically represent desire or want or belief, so it is not possible to compare the successful person to the unsuccessful one in these regards. The person who has followed a model and attributes their success to it may actually have desired success less than a different person who followed the same model and failed. Because it’s not yet possible to test, the successful person will appear to have a superhuman desire for success, while the unsuccessful will appear to be uncommitted and weak willed, even if they invest considerably more effort time or finances into making it.

In motivational, self-help and ‘get rich’ discourse, you always see the stories of successful people who owe their success to whatever model or mindset they believe in. What you never hear are stories of those who’ve genuinely believed in the same model and applied it in their daily lives and still failed. According to the discourse, those people simply haven’t been believing strongly enough or trying hard enough and should keep persisting until they persevere at some undetermined point in the future.

Another thing you never hear is the ‘what’ part of ‘what do I do?’. What you do hear a lot about is the ‘how’ in ‘How do I do it?’, and the difference between ‘what’ and ‘how’ is possibly the most crucial aspect in any endeavour. Imagine you’re about to go out and play a game of basketball, and your coach is telling you to play hard and give 110% and never give up, but doesn’t bother to explain the rules to you. How would you feel about a coach who puts the entire burden of success or failure squarely on your shoulders? Would you say that a coach who lets you figure out by yourself what a dribble is knows anything about winning a game? Certainly, given enough games, you will eventually win, but on the virtue of your merit of figuring out ‘what’ to do (with and without the basketball), not on that of your coach’s pep talks. 

Motivation is as important for success as proper spelling is for a PhD thesis – if the work is poor it’s just wasted effort, and if the work is good nobody will care about the spelling. The secret to success is ‘what’ you do. Where the pep talk is needed is in situations where the rules are clear and the skill is present but the spirit waivers. In such cases, motivation can indeed be the decisive factor. But to take amateurs onto the court and have them playing against professionals is to walk (highly confident and motivated) lambs out to play with the wolves. The same is true of motivational works or any so-called ‘recipe’ for success. 

There are millions of people who have bought and studied various works on achieving success and motivation but only a few have actually achieved anything notable. Is that to say that the others, who constitute the majority, are simply not trying hard enough? Or is it that they are perhaps overwhelmed by odds that motivation, persistence and other such general guidelines cannot offer much help against (powerful and established competition – possibly motivated by the same pep talk and believing in the same model; corrupt government; destitution; physical impediment coupled with poverty; or simply the lack of any good ideas)? Ideas take time and knowledge to develop, but their appearance is as unpredictable as the outcome of a football game – you can consider certain factors that help and can take an educated guess, but you cannot know for sure, as it isn’t exact science.

Herein lays the crux of the matter. Recipes for success might help IF you have a good idea or a skill, talent or other success-worthy merit that needs pursuing quickly. Without this ‘what’, the ‘how’ becomes redundant and a recipe for repeated failure. The question to ask is ‘what will bring me success?’ not ‘how do I achieve success?’. Success is not something that can be pursued in and of itself, and the same is true of riches. Invest in your ideas, abilities and merits, as these will flourish and bring you success. The secret is not to strive for success and become absorbed fully and utterly in its pursuit, but to strive to harness the potential of your skills, ideas and merits and become absorbed fully and utterly in the pursuit of their perfection. It’s the same as driving a car, really: you need to focus all of your attention on the road and the vehicle delivering you to your destination, not on the destination itself. Focusing on the destination will help steer you in the right direction at times but it won’t get you there any faster, or any safer.