(Last but not least, the simplest explanation can't be ignored. Person B needs to engineer frequent rewards. Of course these two face different internal motivational landscapes moving forward! Person A should get out of his own way and not stress too much when motivational issues crop up. Person B toils in impoverished isolation. Person A sticks to his weird intellectual interests and, for whatever reason, ends up landing jobs and friends. In the first place, I strongly suspect that some personalities are more taken towards consistent, single-minded motivation than others.Īlso, we have faced environments of differential reward for following through on our motivations in the past. How can you turn cognitive motivation into felt, affective motivation? How can you power through, when necessary? Try anything, try everything.Īre there people who claim to be constantly motivated emotionallytowards their abstract, creative, knowledgey goals? Yes. If you live in the realm of "knowledge work," for fun or profit, you are hanging your motivational hat primarily on the cognitive elements of motivation.
Social feedback in the here and now brings forward the project in time, rendering the affective component of motivation stronger. For instance, norms create an environment of social rewards (and punishments) that help to muster group cohesion in the pursuit of lofty projects. That's why humans have developed technologies to motivate themselves towards the abstract things. Although it is deeply human to care about the lofty stuff cognitively, this is less straightforward (and physiologically-supported) in emotional terms. It makes sense that: the more abstract, long-term, and removed from everyday life a desire might be, the flakier your motivation becomes. BUT COGNITIVE MOTIVATION WITHOUT EMOTIONAL MOTIVATION DOESN'T ACT AT ALL. EMOTIONAL MOTIVATION WITHOUT COGNITIVE MOTIVATION CAN ACT POORLY. But that won't make the deep-seated, chemically-mediated motivation to light up disappear immediately. You might learn a new terrifying statistic about the health effects of smoking and feel newly motivated to quit. These are emotional processes too, but they have clear rational, "system 2" components.īut motivation's mixed character makes things really messy. Or you might see something for sale and decide to buy it. You might hear about an opportunity, like a job, and decide to apply for it. For instance, someone thinks, remembers, or learns something and catches a wind of motivation. Yet it also seems that, in some meaningful sense, motivation can be born of the mind. Now, the mind and body are not totally separable. The clear cases of somatic-effective motivation are towards things like palatable food and attractive mates. The most appropriate way to explain this kind of motivation is in terms of neurotransmitters and such.
Motivation sometimes comes straightforwardly from the body, as a kind of somatic driver of survival- and reproduction-relevant behaviors. Since motivation is a mixed cognitive-emotional attitude towards some object, it comes from the places that other cognitions and emotions come from. That's enough background to tackle the motivating (har har) question today: Where does motivation come from? Don't forget! Where motivation comes from "Enthusiasm" is affective "need" and "reason" are cognitive, "willingness" can be read as either or both.īottom line: motivation is sometimes affective, sometimes cognitive, sometimes both.
"willingness to do something, or something that causes such willingness".Indeed, the dictionary definition for "motivation" clearly encompasses both the cognitive and emotional aspects of the phenomenon: The affective component is felt viscerally, from mere inclination to burning pressing desire. The cognitive component involves an appraisal of the desirability of doing or having something. Though I am reluctant to commit to a formal definition of "motivation," this much is certainly true: Motivation is a mixed cognitive-emotional state. In order to figure out where motivation comes from, we have to figure out what motivation even is. The truth about motivation and where it comes from is messy, but the truth will set you free. I've been down this road many times, including in my own life. Do you not want the thing after all? Or where did its commensurate motivation go, and how can you get it back? This frustrating lack of motivation creates huge cognitive dissonance. "Not feeling motivated to do the things you want to do" can almost be interpreted as straightforwardly contradictory, like "not wanting to do the things you want to do." Many of my clients have had the experience of not feeling motivated to do things that they think they want to do.