The Secret Sauce of Success
Motivation is a common ingredient to success in all human endeavour, be it sports, arts, education or business. A motivated individual or team succeeds despite their adverse starting odds or the stiff challenges they face enroute. In fact, motivation often overpowers natural talent or the head start that life provides a privileged few as it powers them to the victory.
Motivation stands firm on a stable tripod, its three legs: money, purpose, and autonomy. Remove any one of the three, and it wobbles. Understanding this triad is essential to nourish engagement, creativity, and sustained performance. Further in the long run, interrelationship between these three elements can strengthen or weaken motivation.
The relative importance of the three can be seen where each of the element is essential and cannot exist in its absence, and where it plays a secondary role:
- Without money, the world of employment is void. This is best amplified by workers laying down their tools to seek higher wages. But in the world of art, sport, hobby and education, money plays only a supporting though an enabling role. Grants, prize money, and scholarships are not only hallmarks of excellence in their chosen field, but significant validation of inherent talent which strengthen their motivation to fuel greater success.
- Purpose makes education, especially secondary education meaningful. Purpose transforms learning into a quest. Students engage to make a real-world impact—resolve challenges, ease lives and designing solutions. They move from mechanical memorizing to meaningful-metamorphosis. Absence or more often dilution of purpose leads to robotic engagement, with hands and legs engaged but a missing heart that keeps their contribution to the minimum.
- Autonomy leads in the world of art, sports and hobbies, for it provides freedom, the freedom to fail. Autonomy fused with purpose can make art inspirational, and hobbies vocational. Here money is an enabler, for it buys both the time and tools required for the pursuit.
Motivation is no longer a mystery for it has become a design challenge. The tripod works best in employment when the money is fair, purpose clear, and autonomy real; in education: where money supports, purpose guides, and autonomy fulfils, and in art & sport: when money enables, purpose leads and autonomy liberate.
The idealist in me, dreams of a utopian world where education, work and art are fused into one giant engagement. Everyone lives a fully motivated life, engaging with purpose, and are free to choose what they engage in, as they earn enough money doing it. Can the growing retired community show the way though their lived life?
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