Understanding motivation
breadcrumbs on fear and ambition
When I started this newsletter series, I was still struggling with the frazzled state of my mind. I was aware that chasing productivity had eroded my ability to focus, and that my short, fractured attention span was a major symptom of burnout for me and a lot of people I know.
After quitting a job that made me feel bad every day (even the days I didn’t work), I noticed improvements in my mood, thoughts, sleep, and lifestyle. A few weeks into being free from meetings and largely untethered from my laptop and phone, I began to experience time differently, too. I moved through the days with less anxiety and pessimism, more intention and certainty. I felt more at leisure and, oddly but undeniably, more focused and motivated. I was reading a new book every week and using my evenings to experiment in the kitchen instead of half-watching whatever show had just been added on Netflix. I felt invigorated by exercise after being stuck in a rut that made working out feel like a chore. And I began writing for myself, in my own voice, for the first time in years.
Which made me really curious to understand how my own personal variety of motivation works. This vastly more content and inspired version of myself wasn’t just the byproduct of more free time and no job. Eventually I’d need to return to full time work, but I wasn’t worried about it the way I’d worried about things before. What changed to make me more self-motivated and certain about what I wanted to be doing? How was I finding fulfillment? Why did my days feel so different?
I had to quit my job to answer these questions, but I learned that my professional burnout masked an even bigger obstacle to happiness: my own fears. It turns out that not doing do the things I most wanted to do was as much about feeling unable to do them as it was about my time and energy.
There’s a moment in Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist when the novel’s protagonist, a young shepherd, has the same realization. He’s on a grueling journey through the desert from North Africa to Egypt. His guide, the alchemist, tells him that he doesn’t need to know how to survive in the desert to get to his destination, he just needs to listen to his heart. At first the shepherd only hears his heart’s loudest complaints — when it’s deeply sad or when it’s worried and won’t let him sleep. But something changes when he makes an effort to listen to his heart day in and day out:
“My heart is a traitor,” the boy said to the alchemist, when they had paused to rest the horses. “It doesn’t want me to go on.”
“That makes sense,” the alchemist answered. “Naturally, it’s afraid that, in pursuing your dream, you might lose everything you’ve won.”
“Well, then, why should I listen to my heart?”
“Because you’ll never again be able to keep it quiet. Even if you pretend not to have heard what it tells you, it will always be there inside you, repeating to you what you’re thinking about life and about the world.”
“You mean I should listen, even if it’s treasonous?”
“Treason is a blow that comes unexpectedly. If you know your heart well, it will never be able to do that to you. Because you’ll know its dreams and wishes, and will know how to deal with them. You will never be able to escape from your heart. So it’s better to listen to what it has to say. That way, you’ll never have to fear an unanticipated blow.”
I used to think it should be simple to decide how I want to spend my time. But I was not seeing how intensely emotional and terrifying it can be to invest our time in something we care about. If we decide to dedicate time to pursuing something (a hobby, a relationship) we usually have an outcome in mind, and as soon as we get emotionally attached to that outcome there’s a possibility that we’ll suffer disappointment.
When I was burning out at my desk job, I distinctly remember wanting my weekends and evenings to be completely unscheduled and unplanned. I was exhausted by the effort of showing up five days a week, but I also I remember thinking that I deserved to do nothing when I wasn’t working. And while that’s true, it’s not actually what I wanted. Deep down, there were things other people were doing that I desperately wanted to try. But part of me was afraid of what would happen if, on top of a job that drained me, I squandered my precious free time doing things I wasn’t good at or ended up not enjoying after all. My fears told me it was far safer to dream about some alternate version of myself than it was to try to become her.
I was unhappy at my job, but separate from that, I couldn’t enjoy my personal time because I didn’t understand my heart’s fears at all. The way I’d been defining leisure — as completely free from expectation and ambition — is not leisure to me at all. It was just the best way to avoid what my heart was afraid of.
Out of frustration or desperation or both, I stopped listening to my fears as constraints and started arguing back. What if I quit my job to bake, only to learn I hated baking for other people? Fine, I’ll just start doing it now and see for myself. And that’s when I understood that I really just wanted to spend my time learning. To work on self-guided projects that felt good while I did them. Because that is what motivates me to get through the other tasks in my life. It didn’t feel like my worst fears were coming true, it felt like I was becoming someone I’d always wanted to be, and creating a contentment that no one could take away from me. As the alchemist put it:
“Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself. And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams, because every second of the search is a second’s encounter with God and with eternity.”
Wishing you well,
Amy