Motivation is a topic that greatly interests me. I've been studying research on the subject and have been looking at various opposing views for a few years now. This is the broad picture of how I currently see motivation.
Every action we take is guided by some kind of motivation, whether it is direct or indirect. There is no such thing as "discipline"; convincing yourself to do something is a matter of becoming motivated to do that task and less motivated to ignore the task.
Everyone has personal heuristics that guides his actions, a set of personality components that determine how powerful each of our competing motivations are. Since I haven't seen a better word for this, I call it "Drive". The nature of our drive starts from a genetic base and evolves with our experiences.
The only way to change our behavior is to change our personal drive in some way. By far, the most popular way to do this is to apply the behaviorist principles of conditioning. This is effective for promoting or deterring specific actions, but the behaviorist framework is not useful for globally changing the broad type of actions one is motivated to do. For example, no conditioning will make someone feel truly motivated to act ethical.
Changing one's behavior in a specific situation is useful, but it is important to address the larger matter of what kind of things motivate an individual in general. The most important changes must have a cognitive basis to truly change a person.
How does one accomplish this? I have no idea. I've read a silly amount of self-improvement books and articles. Many of them say with absolute certainty how to change what motivates us on a broad and deep level; however, I've yet to see a more rigorous examination (or even strong academic acknowledgement ) of the subject.
Although I think the importance of individuality is often overstated in psychology (we're more alike than most of us believe), it is possible that the successful answers to the question vary too much between individuals to examine well.
The name of this blog is The Pursuit of Mastery which is something toward which I deeply want to be motivated. I will talk about what I'm doing to change myself in another post.
I feel that my personal attempts to shift my drive away from being content with a comfortable life into motivating me to purse excellence seem to be working for me. I am drawn toward activities that improve my abilities and sharpen my mind much more than I was before I starting actively trying to change. I have a long way to go, but I am building momentum.
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