David Shenk looks at motivation as being a critical part to achieving things in life. He states how "the single greatest lesson from past ultra-achievers is not how easily things came to them, but how irrepressible and resilient they were" (120). Motivation makes one passionate about something, and this leads one to work overtime and harder than ever before. Shenk uses the example of two twins, Otto and Ewald, to show how even when two people are born with similar genes and raised in similar environments, it is their motivation that makes them into who they are (83).
-Arjun Ahuja (aahuja12@gmail.com)
Motivation has a huge role to play in the shaping of an individual because it ends up defining who they are as a person. If someone is motivated to do well in school, go to a good college, and get a good career, then their efforts were initiated by the first feeling of motivation that they felt. The sum of their work was due to the motivation that ignited all of the hard work to begin. The same goes for athletes who want to pursue their sports professionally. On the idea of athletes, Shenk writes about the Jamaican runners who were able to do so well in the Olympics. He says that “They are not superhumans with rare super-genes. They are participants in a culture of the extreme, willing to devote more, to ache more, and to risk more in order to do better” (Shernk 89). In other words, they are just extremely motivated to do what they do well.
ReplyDeleteIn terms of motivation in nature, animals have had to evolve just to survive. Some very good motivators are hunger and thirst, so the animals who were the best at satisfying these needs were able to survive and reproduce, following the idea of natural selection. For example, unlike many cats, jaguars do not avoid water and actually can go into it to swim and hunt. A decent amount of their diet consists of fish, turtles, or caimans. http://animals.nationalgeographic.com/animals/mammals/jaguar/ ). Something in their environment in the past must have caused this advantage to come about. There may have been lower amounts of prey on land due to drought at a certain point in history, and ancestors of jaguars would have had to go to the water for food. The ancestors who could swim the best or swim at all would be able to eat and survive, while others who did not have this advantage would die out.
Overall, I think people may be born with some innate motivation, but the majority of it is brought on by their surroundings and environment. Whether it be the situation they are in which forces more than motivates people to do something well, or just because competition from other people is around, motivation is activated largely by environment.
An intense motivation to achieve something specific can completely alter the course of a persons life. A person who is devoted to a particular sport will shape their life decisions based around their dedications. An extremely good basketball player may choose his colleges solely by their basketball teams and the potential scholarships that person may receive. Additionally, as Shenk alluded to, these motivations are often created by the people around you. "From the very moment of his birth, Yo-Yo was exposed to music in the most profound and exquisite way. Both Marina, A trained opera singer, and her husband, Hiao-Tsiun, a teacher/composer/conductor, had immigrated to paris as young adults to study, play, compose and teach music."(Shenk 93). In essence, you are not born with the motivation to become a musician but your surroundings create the motivation within you. This could also be an evolutionary advantage because it would allow people to adapt to their surroundings by striving to succeed in a field which would allow them to survive. A predetermined motivation into a specific field might backfire if the motivation does not help the organism survive. I also concur with "Ryeker" that being motivated to find food and water would allow organisms to survive long enough to reproduce. However, in that case I think it would be an innate motivation.
ReplyDeleteThe final heights that people reach are often determined by just how motivated they are and how much time they put into it. As Shenk described in his introduction, putting enormous quantities of time into a sport or hobby will allow you to become extremely skilled. I believe that this is likely the most important aspect of training that people have to go through to become the top competitors in their fields. Additionally it is important for parents to support their children in their endeavors. Children will not be encouraged to continue on with a behavior or hobby if their parents repeatedly put them down or discourage it.
Vlad Miskevich (vladmiskevich@yahoo.com)