Three kinds of motivation

There’s a different fuel for different situations

Woody Allen once said, “80% of success is just showing up”. Reading that as a teenager, I was really confused about what “showing up” meant. After a decade of grit and grind and an array of challenges, now I painfully understand what that means.

This is my essay about how to better prepare your mind for those challenges — about motivating yourself. It is my notion that there are three kinds of motivation that will get you through the highs and lows. It can be misleading to give a one-size-fits-all advice on this, so it’s important to have some level of metacognition rather than blindly sticking to one advice.

1. Vision and purpose.

This motivation is something like “making the world a better place”. This high level “why” keeps your head up high, lets you create long term ambitious goals, and creates deep meaning behind your daily struggles. These motivations are both pure, philosophical, and abstract.

I wanted to change the world and make a huge impact to humanity. I chose startup as the ‘how’, and medicine as the ‘what’. That’s the rationale behind why I went to med school, wrapped up in two sentences. That was what motivated me to go to the study room in a good day.

2. Basic human desires.

The thing is, that abstract concept of elegant motivation will not give the reason to rise up when times get tough. You need something more powerful and raw.

“I have to learn medical knowledge and expertise because I want to create an impact for humanity” did not ring a bell when I had to drag myself onto yet another study session in med school. The big lesson I learned was that high level motivation alone cannot get you through the really bad times. The moments you wake up at 5:30 am to prep for a cardiology round, the late night study sessions that last until 3:00 am, and crunch times right before an exam… these are hard to any human beings.

This motivation is on a lower level of human needs, something more raw and primal. This is for the ‘bad’ days.

In my case it was peer pressure. I did it because my friends did it. Another examples of these would be: ‘I want to be rich’, ‘I want to impress that girl’, ‘I don’t want to be embarrassed’, ‘I don’t want to miss out’. Everyone has one. Thousands of businesses have been created to impress a girl.

3. Unconscious habits.

The last one isn’t even conscious motivation. Yet it’s the most important, most durable fuel of all. You do it because that’s who you are. You do it because you’ve been doing it for the past decade of your life. This momentum, routine, whatever you call it, now defines a part of you.

After a certain time, other conscious motivations get fossilized and consolidated into who you are. You don’t really motivate you on a day-to-day basis, you just chug on with your life unconsciously.

Grit and resourcefulness is now a part of who I am. I just do things. I just solve problems. I just focus on impact. No logic or motivation is really needed except for a couple of down times.

The high level motivation keeps the vision alive in the good days, the low level motivation keeps me raw power to get up in the bad days, and the accumulated lifelong momentum supports everything else.

There’s a different fuel for different situations, and understanding your own arsenal prepares you better for the long haul. To showing up.