№s 00031 & 00012: Motivation twofer

Feeling unmotivated? It's not just you.

Today we have a twofer: a pair of claims for motivation, ambition and energy. №s 00031 and 00012 hail from different parts of the country, with a different timeline, but both feel the distinct loss of that drive to move ever forward.

Item description:

Article or kind of material lost: Motivation at work / Ambition and energy

Color: Bright / Sky Blue

Size: Pretty big / Variable dependent on the day

Approx. date lost: 2022 / Early months of 2020

Location: New Jersey and my brain / Somewhere on the northside of Minneapolis. Possibly in my home.

Here is what claimant № 00031 had to say:

“I work in a field where ‘passion’ is assumed to be an overriding aspect of my mandate — it’s been gone for a while and transferred to a lot of non-work aspects of my life. I don’t necessarily think I need it back, but I do miss it.”

Similarly, here is what claimant № 00012 had to say:

“I miss my energy and drive to spend more time in my studio. Now I routinely [or maybe actively] schedule time to be in my studio.”

We (in our culture shaped by capitalism and white supremacy) tend to think of ambition and drive as personality traits — there are ambitious people and unambitious people. The ambitious ones are successful, so the story goes, and the unmotivated have only themselves to blame.

“Lazy” is an epithet we are trained to avoid.

Motivation, ambition and energy are more than just celebrated personality traits, though — they are states of being that wax and wane in all of us, much more of a thermometer than an off/on switch. But anecdotally I’ve been hearing from many friends and acquaintances that are feeling the overall trend line of their motivation heading steeply downwards.

That drive can feel like the wind at our backs, making everything easier. Without it, we’re grinding on against the forces imploring us to stop.

The Poet with the Birds, 1911 by Marc Chagall. Always a favorite at Minneapolis Institute of Art

One of my favorite paintings at the Minneapolis Institute of Art is The Poet with the Birds, by Marc Chagall. I think I’m drawn to it because of the colors, the relatively simplistic rendering of the figure, compared to the detail taken with the individual leaves and blooms on the trees.

Is the poet being lazy, unproductive, not bent over his writing desk? Or is he motivated to watch the birds?

Sometimes finding lost motivation lies not in self-judgment or seeking to find the energy we once had for something (a job, a creative practice, relationships, exercise) but in switching your lens to pay attention to where your energy naturally feels like it should be going right now. Sometimes you can’t just switch your focus, and sometimes those things that you don’t have motivation for are necessary to do anyway. But I have found that often energy begets energy, and when you can shift your attention to another place, it can give you motivation for other things, as well.