Layers Of Meaning: How To Be Intrinsically Motivated
“Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answers to its problems and to fulfill the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual.” — Viktor Frankl
“We may spend most of our waking hours advancing our own interests, but we all have the capacity to transcend self-interest and become simply a part of a whole. It’s not just a capacity; it’s the portal to many of life’s most cherished experiences.” — Jonathan Haidt
Motivation is one of the elusive elixirs of human flourishing.
Motivation itself is often looked down upon as being the weaker younger sibling to discipline. Yet, motivation serves an important role in helping establish disciplines in our lives. We have to have the motivation to take that initial step toward forming the new habit (which eventually becomes a discipline) especially when it’s something we don’t want or feel like doing.
Being a disciplined person is often a rarity in today’s society but, I think part of the problem is found in missing the stepping stones toward discipline—in understanding the key ingredients that, when combined in the right order, create the essence of becoming a disciplined person. You can’t call a Pepperoni Pizza a Pepperoni Pizza just because it has Pepperoni on it. You call it a Pepperoni Pizza because of the combination of ALL of the ingredients (flour, tomato sauce, cheese, etc., etc.) coming together into beautiful union.
Similarly so, you don’t become a motivated person by the simple, singular ingredient of motivation. There must be the convergence of several key ingredients in order to develop the aptitude of being intrinsically motivated.
So in order to get there, let’s backtrack our way to the bottom layer.
The First Layer: Meaning
Motivation comes from Meaning.
Meaning… it is meaning itself that creates motivation. If your house is on fire, you have all the motivation you need to jump out of bed fully awake, alert, and energized to run around frantically grabbing as much as we can before escaping. Why? Because your home and belongings hold immense meaning to you and those you love. On the other hand, if your alarm goes off at 5:00am in order to go to the gym for a workout, your motivation may be mediocre at best unless you have provided a framework of meaning behind getting up early to get to the gym.
Meaning can be given to us from the surrounding circumstances that create either a sense of urgency or allow a sense of lethargy.
Meaning can also be created by our perspective or perception of something.
If you’re playing a football game and the team you’re playing’s record is 2-5 vs. 5-2, you are likely to come into the game with less motivation than you would have had otherwise due to the perception that it will be an “easy” game.
On the golf course, if there is a 5-foot putt on the fifth hole to save par, vs. a 5-foot putt on the 18th hole for birdie to win, there will be a drastic difference in the meaning you prescribe to those two putts, regardless of the objective reality of them being the same basic action.
The beauty in understanding motivation comes from meaning is in knowing that we have the ability to create and infuse meaning into everything we do. I like to refer to this as intentionality. “The fact of being deliberate or purposive.” (https://www.lexico.com/en/definition/intentionality)
Synthesizing our actions with meaning creates greater motivation to whatever we choose to do. If you’re mowing the lawn because “you have to” then it will feel like a cumbersome duty that only brings frustration and annoyance. What if, instead, you approached mowing the lawn with the perspective that having a mown lawn will bring you joy every time you see it or, that having a lawn to mow is a blessing in the first place… that mowing the lawn is a great opportunity for some exercise, sunlight, space / detachment from your job… for some time enjoying nature and grounding yourself in the simple beauties found in life. There are countless intentions and, it is these shifts in perspective that bring greater meaning to the action itself. As a result, we carry greater motivation to do the action well.
The Second Layer: Responsibility
Meaning comes from Responsibility.
Without responsibility, meaning can rarely be found or created.
If every thought, decision, or action you made throughout the day had zero ramifications and you had no responsibilities in life—what’s the point in being alive? When you think about each decision you have made today, you will rarely be able to find a decision that had no meaning or purpose behind it, and the decisions we make in the context of our responsibility—as a mom, as an employee, as a U.S. citizen, as a neighbor—have greater meaning attached to them. Even at the most fundamental level, as human beings, we all have a responsibility just by being human, just by the fact that we are conscious creatures.
Responsibility is something that is given to us before we can ever take it.
As a child, you are often excused of responsibility because you’re not old enough to be thought of as responsible or to be given responsibilities. But, once you’ve been given responsibility, you have to take it and be responsible with that responsibility. Much like how minors are tried as juveniles until they’ve turned 18 and are then tried as an adult.
Responsibility is something we must continually take up once we’ve been given it. The second we stop accepting the responsibility we’ve been given, we begin to, slowly but surely, sap all of the meaning out of any activity we are doing. When you stop viewing your job as an important responsibility in light of your role within the greater whole of the organization, you start showing up solely for the purpose of a paycheck and begin losing the empowerment found in responsibility. Similarly, if I want to write new blog posts each month to further my writing career and continue encouraging others, then I have to keep taking up that responsibility. If I decide to not be responsible and take a month off, then finding the meaning in writing will be harder to do than the prior month.
Meaning comes from responsibility because responsibility means what you do has an effect. It also means that effect is larger than just yourself—inevitably effecting more people associated with your actions/responsibility. This adds weight to our thoughts, decisions, and actions and, weight is good thing. It’s similar to building muscle—without weight, the movement loses much of its value. Adding weight increases the value of each repetition you take in the gym, and the same is true in life.
By taking on responsibilities, we add greater meaning to everything we do in our daily lives.
“How do we make sense of the world? We make sense of the world by making something of the world. The human quest for meaning is played out in human making. Meaning and making go together.” — Andy Crouch
The Third Layer: Ownership
Responsibility comes from Ownership.
Once we’re given responsibility we have to take ownership of that responsibility.
Before we can take ownership of the things given to us, we must first take ownership of ourselves.
What does it mean to take ownership of ourselves? It means an adamant obstinance in refusing to make excuses for what we say or do in our daily lives. Taking ownership means we will take the credit or the blame for the good and the bad that comes from the words we say or the actions we do.
Taking ownership is hard, and it never happens by chance. It is ALWAYS a conscious choice. We must make the decision to own up to the outcomes we produce, regardless of how many other factors came into play. When competing in a golf tournament, there are hundreds of factors that can be credited or blamed for a result: the wind, the grass, the temperature, the lie of the ball, the noise in your backswing, the comment made by a playing competitor, the memory of the bogey you made last hole, the bad bounce it took when it landed, the miss-calculation of the yardage, and on and on it goes.
Taking ownership is always hard and, it doesn’t necessarily get easier with practice. The more we take ownership for both the wins and the losses, the more we are familiar with how it feels in the moment. It doesn’t feel good to take the blame for falling short, for not reaching your full potential, for letting down yourself and others around you. The more we take ownership, the more we know how tough it is to own up to our shortcomings.
Yet, the more we take ownership for our lives, the more we see the growth that occurs as a result. If we never take ownership for our words or actions, we will never give ourselves the chance to improve. If what we say or do was purely because of other people, situations, or circumstances, then we would have no way to improve since we are at the mercy of the external factors and influences in our lives. This is a helpless state, and it’s a state of atrophy instead of growth.
Taking ownership for both the big and the small decisions in our everyday lives allows us to take on greater and greater responsibility — once we know we’re ready for it.
And taking on greater responsibility begins to infuse greater and greater meaning into everything we do in knowing how it will effect and impact the people that depend on us for their own livelihood or flourishing.
And by seeing meaning in everything we do, we are empowered with an endless supply of motivation to keep pushing upward and onward ESPECIALLY on the days when that feels like that last thing we want to do.
Motivation comes from meaning. Meaning comes from responsibility. And responsibility comes from ownership.
Want more motivation in your life? Take ownership.
Want more meaning? Take ownership.
Want more responsibility? Take ownership.
If change is to happen, it begins with you and it begins with me.
It begins and ends with ownership.
