Finding your Mojo - The act of motivation

According to Walt Disney- “All our dreams can come true if we have the courage to pursue them”. Courage really appears when we have a reason or there is something motivating us towards our goals.

Motivation is especially important as students prepare for their exams. The ability to see beyond the current raft of assignments or examinations to foresee a rosier path to achieving goals is a spring board that can help to overcome short term setbacks.

In primitive time, it was easy to motivate humans with the provision of the basic necessities such as food, clothing, water etc, but it gets more difficult to find the right motivating factors as humans satisfy their essential needs. There is now a huge market for people who understand the acts of motivation. Some of those people now work as personal coaches or motivation speakers. The main premise of the role of motivators is that we all have the capacity and the ability to perform better than we are willing to admit or strive for, but with the right incentives, we can go further than we are ordinarily willing to push ourselves. In short, we have the ability to do extra-ordinary things when we put our minds to it.

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One undeniable common factor between humans and animals is that we can both be motivated to do things. Man has over the last hundred years been able to teach and develop the act of motivation and the more options we have, the more opportunities we have to motivate people to do things we want them to do without the use of force. Parents and managers use presents and bonuses to get the best out of children and staff respectively.

Human needs are complex and we are motivated by different things at different times.  Also, because our circumstances change so frequently, the things that motivate us now may not do so in future. In essence, the motivator has to constantly look for different ways to get us to perform at our best at all times.

Geniuses have been borne out of people’s willingness and determination to go further than anyone else has ever gone before. In our modern materialistic world, money can be the motivator, but to others it is the legacy of reaching the heights that might have been deemed impossible in the past. Think of the people with multiple World records. According to Zig Ziglar “Motivation is the fuel necessary to keep the human engine running”.

One of the most important things that we can do is being able to tap into our inner strength and find ways of self motivating ourselves in order to achieve our goals. There is no doubt that we are constantly faced by obstacles, but our determination can push us ahead in those times when life challenges hit us.

Motivation is a bit like imagining that we are standing on the top of the mountain and being able to see a rosy future ahead that others may not be able to see. We must be willing to imagine a future beyond the current tough times, where we are doing the things we love and enjoying the fruit of our hard-work.

About the Author: Ade Otukoya

Ade Otukoya is a Senior Lecturer in Accounting and Finance. He is an author on e-books on Finance.