truth about what motivates us

POSTED BY: AURaptor
UPDATED: Thursday, April 21, 2011 04:56
VIEWED: 3408
PAGE 1 of 1

AURAPTOR

Wednesday, April 20, 2011 11:14 PM

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

LOIRE

Thursday, April 21, 2011 12:22 AM

Wow! Gotta spread this. And not just cuz my unemployed mate makes movies and runs an open mike night. Thanks!

L

GREENKA61

Thursday, April 21, 2011 12:47 AM

Wow. In my life, the findings are true! I do such better work when I have autonomy to do my job, but when a boss decides to micromanage, I just shut down.

AURAPTOR

Thursday, April 21, 2011 3:20 AM

I wish I could draw like that.....

" I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend. "

DREAMTROVE

Thursday, April 21, 2011 4:56 AM

When I was a small child, I was handed a world, and my first instinct was to explore, and try to understand. I wanted to know how everything worked. The world was a beautiful place full of friendly people doing things that were innovative and fun.

Then that world was taken away from me, and replaced with America. This gave me a few hurdles, like I had to learn a new language, and society didn't run as well, but it was all still fairly wonderful and functional.

That world was taken away, and I was presented with the country. This world had a dearth of people, and an excess of free time. I became a fairly intense problem solver. I wondered why things worked, how, and what end this meant for the world these ideas went into.

As I grew, my first goal was to understand things, learn, and to analyze how things worked. Not just mechanical things anymore, but more abstract ideas.

I critiqued the educational methods in kindergarten and first grade, and in second grade I rejected them and dropped out. I was talked back into school, but 4th and 5th grade were even worse than before. The educational model at its core was flawed, and it was obvious to me, and none of the information was anything that a kid by themselves wouldn't have figured out years earlier, and that was it for me and school.

I tried college right away, but it would take several tries. I wasn't a solid social fit at all. The work was easy, but the social structure was beyond me. It remained beyond me. I focused on gaining skills. I got better at stuff. Lots of stuff.

A combination of finances and a real annoyance at the interference with my personal self direction led me away from college, and I got caught in work. I had always been working, part time, but I finally took up teaching. I experimented with some of my ideas about how education might work, and at first it was tricky, but I got to be very successful, particularly at retraining workers for new jobs. A search engine company was hiring all of my students, and then they came for me. I found the corporate world incredibly frustrating. At first, it was a lot of fun. I could create stuff, but the overmanagement and sometimes lack of self direction got to be very annoying. I wanted to create stuff. If there was a target goal, that was fine, but then I would have ideas, and take them home, and eventually myself and a partner created our own corporation. That led to me being eventually directed much more than I was before, and did not end well.

Finally I realized that the key to self direction was independence, and as long as I was salaried I would never have that, and I had to create my own business. I started a small business which I still have, on a $20 bill. It took some chance encounters and real innovation to business models before it created true independence.

Now I am getting ready to get back to what I did as a kid: Create self-directed innovations.

The purpose here is not just the creations, but what the creations enable me and other to create. The mastery is an essential building block of the work. It's no longer an end goal to me, but the essential part of the process. In fact, mastery is impossible, so steady improvement is the only option, because the truth is unreachable. None of this can be done without autonomy.

Better even than a work which pays just enough to not worry about money is to not pay at all, but in fact to remove the issue altogether by having a secondary revenue stream.

I find that this has given me a work ethic that the wealthy do not have. I had to figure all this out myself, and how to build it, and I never stop working, I only change what I am working on. The less time that I spend to make money, the more I spend to do other things, which result in more progress and satisfaction for me, and the best way to reduce the amount of time earning money is to reduce my outgo, rather than increase my income.

In fact, I've reached the paradoxical position of believing that money is even more of a liability than portrayed here: If you sp