My interest in self motivation

I wanted to take a step back in this blog posting and talk a bit about me, and how I came to be interested in self motivation.

I was never a particularly motivated child. I did well in elementary, middle and high school, getting by on the brains I inherited from my mom. I never worked hard at anything, at least that I can remember, except for Latin. The only reason I worked hard at Latin was because there was only four people in the class, so you were guaranteed to be called on to read at least twice a week. Consequently, you never knew when that would happen. If you weren’t prepared …

I never really cared about any of my subjects, but did what was necessary to get decent grades, which luckily wasn’t a lot. My mother’s lament was always, “Bob, you aren’t working up to your potential.” I heard that a lot.

Based upon my performance on the PSAT (my mom was an excellent test taker as well), I got a scholarship to a good school outside of Chicago to major in engineering. The application to take the PSAT asked what my professional goals were, so since I was good in math and science, I wrote down engineering. Did I know what an engineer did? Nope. Did I ever talk to an engineer? Nope.

At this college I wasn’t able to get by on just my brains - hard work was required - and I flunked out. Eventually I returned to school, got my bachelors, went to law school and passed the bar. By this time I had at least learned how to work harder. But I still wasn’t really interested in much of what I was learning.

After being a lawyer for 15 years I decided I wanted to be a psychologist. I checked around at two near by universities, but the PhD programs were extremely difficult to get into, and I was a single parent, and … I never made the effort it would have required to get accepted.

Eventually I enrolled in an online masters program in instructional design. I wasn’t in a relationship at the time, so I had time on my hands and thought it might be a good substitute for becoming a psychologist. Running through all of the classes was the concept that you needed to build motivation into the design of your instruction.

This was an amazing concept for me. I don’t remember any of my teachers ever trying to motivate me. I became fascinated with motivation. I expanded my knowledge of motivation into fields other than education, motivation in sports and motivation in the employment setting. I slowly came to realize that the reason I was sort of floating along, living a pleasant hassle free existence, was that I wasn’t motivated. Instead of making choices, I had been floating with the current.

Motivation would change all that.

Do you have a dream that you just can't seem to get moving on? Maybe it involves a career change, or a change in your personal life. If so, I would love to hear about it. Just leave a comment below, by clicking on the word comments.