What motivates you?

Do you ever have some days where you just don’t want to do anything? I’m sure we do. On some point of time in our life, we have days when we are totally unmotivated. Regardless it’s about doing something that we are really like, for example in my case, blogging or taking pictures, or developing websites. (yes, I like to develop beautiful website but I have times when I feel scared and very unwilling to do it).

I read quite a lot of books on how to motivate ourselves, or listen to some podcasts about motivation. Sometimes it works, I can be motivated for some time. Similar to petrol to a car, when the petrol runs out, the car stops. After a while, I ran out of “fuel”.

So, what motivates you? Or how to keep yourself motivated all the time?

Recently, I read a book and inside I found a very valuable piece of advice.

Do you know the story about the donkey and the carrot? It’s one of the classic children stories. It has many versions though, but I’ll tell you mine. The very lazy donkey owned by a farmer. It supposedly helped the farmer to pull the cart. The donkey is not willing to move but the farmer is smarter, he hangs a carrot in front of the donkey. The donkey sees it and it starts moving to bite the carrot. But before the carrot trick is working, the farmer used to hit the donkey with a stick, and it used to work. And it doesn’t work after some time.

The story is related to the book I mentioned earlier. Or can you guess the relation between the story and the post title?

It’s about whether we can find our “carrot” and our “stick”. Carrot means our accomplishment meanwhile stick means punishment. What are the things make us feel accomplished at the end of the day? And what are the punishment we’re trying to avoid, the bare minimal thing. Because when we are not motivated to do good things, we also don’t want to get the punishment, which means, we will still be “motivated” to do something.. Which is to avoid the punishment.

Do you agree? Let me know your thought.