Understanding & Mastering Your 10 Motivators
When you do, you will be more successful, do projects that make you happy, and understand more what kind of people you need to partner with.
I have listed the 10 most significant motivational drivers. These can be singular influences or – for most of us, in most situations – these can form a cocktail of many motivators which seem to change continuously depending on the subject and circumstance. To better understand your own motivation, consider the following ten motivators:
1. Are you an enthusiast? – Someone who derives their energy from the passion of what they are trying to do. To test yourself, quickly scan this list of words and if you would use them when describing how you feel about what you do, you are at least partially an enthusiast. Love, devoted, passionate, aficionado, admirer, believer, buff and fan.
2. Are you a “I’m with him/her” person? Someone that likes to support or be supported by someone else and a team. You may still have ideas and want to suggest things but seek someone else’s agreement and optimally avoid to take a lead role. You derive your energy from having someone else carry the responsibility. You will recognise this particular motivational influence is at work if you never do things on your own.
3. Are you motivated by perfection? This can be the reason you produce great work but it can also challenge your ability to balance commercial reality. Seth Godin often talks about the dark side of this motivation, which he calls: “never good enough to ship.” This is when an artist or creative is never happy enough with their finished work, such that it never gets to a state that is ‘good enough to sell’ in their mind.
4. Are you motivated by doing good things that have good outcomes for other people? You will know if this is you, because you continually help people even if they are better off than you. You possibly feel some pleasure from other people thinking on you as a great person to which you, of course, then play down the compliment. This is quite a kiwi trait.
5. You care, and have empathy for all people and that manifests itself in you shouldering extra responsibility from the people around you. This will often mean you are trying to protect people from the circumstances that they bring upon themselves from their lack of effort or poor decisions.
6. Are you motivated by a need for recognition, fame and status? Is this your ego talking? If you crave recognition, to be identified, to be named as the person that made the biggest difference. To have an ego is to be human, but ego motivation is usually a person that craves recognition on a continuous basis. Donald Trump for example must default to ego motivation on a constant basis.
7. Are you motivated by a fear of failure and find when you are confronted by the possibility of failure you get motivated to put more and more effort in? Many young people find this hard to see in themselves but it is prevalent in ambitious people who feel they have something to prove.
8. Are you motivated by a desire to feel that ‘magic’ when things work out and your best hopes come true? This is a feeling of excitement which is caused by adrenaline pumping through your body. It is that winning feeling of elation and inner happiness. This is pure and beautiful and once you have experienced it you will want this rush again and again.
9. Are you motivated by a desire for power and control? This is a classic emperor or leader type motivation and is often epitomized by someone who wants everyone to report back, as opposed to allowing them to make their own decision.
10. Are you motivated by money and a desire to have wealth? It is so easy to see how money is a part of many peoples motivation when it is a means to securing our basic psychological needs: food, shelter and security.
Motivation is personal and there is no right or wrong on any one day. It’s a healthy mix of all these things continually jostling you that balances your values, world views and helps you to create the world you live in.