Reflecting on Motivation

At certain times throughout my life I have struggled to find the motivation to work. My desire to exert effort has ebbed and flowed over the years and until recently, my understanding of that experience was minimal. In the early years I didn’t question much of anything, believing that low motivation was a given and I trusted that I needed to keep working hard to succeed in life. In the years since school the routine of working, earning, saving & spending meant that although doubts about my chosen path were present, they didn’t receive the attention that they deserved. This post is a reflection on what I’ve learned about motivation and how I’ve applied the lessons to my own life.

Motivator 1 - Achievement 🏅

Achievement was the first source of motivation in my life. Growing up I was informed at an early age that I was ‘bright’ and an ‘above-average’ student. It felt satisfying to receive that praise and I also learned that demonstrating those qualities was a reliable way to feel valued by others including my family, peers and society in general. I was most comfortable with STEM subjects as there were clear rules that I needed to follow and I enjoyed competing with friends for the best grades.

Earning a Degree

Approaching high school graduation I had been conditioned to progress to university without considering an alternative or working towards a plan for my future career. I recall having no desire to study anything in particular and relied on my comfort in STEM subjects at school to inform my area of study. I aimed for a degree that had the highest qualification mark possible, as that would be a fitting demonstration of my achievements. I went to The University of Sydney based on the esteem that it held and chose to study a Bachelor of Engineering - Mechatronic (Space) because it seemed engaging enough and sounded impressive. Without any idea of what I wanted to do with my life, grades remained my measurement of success at university. I trusted grades to be an accurate measurement of the knowledge I had gained. I now understand that it represents what I was able to demonstrate at the time within the criteria that were assessed. I found that I mostly enjoyed subjects that involved computer programming. There was something satisfying about figuring out how to instruct a computer to perform a task I had in mind and then revising the implementation to perform more efficiently.

Entering the Workforce

Towards the end of my degree, I applied for several internships and received feedback stating that I had a “lack of interest in the company/industry” and as difficult as that was, I wholeheartedly agreed. With persistence I eventually found an internship that enabled me to complete the work experience requirements of my degree. The internship involved building software at a level of complexity that I hadn’t experienced. The opportunity to learn new skills and use them to solve more complex problems than I’d faced in the past was energising. My motivation to perform well was boosted by the coaching I received during the internship as well as the expectation to present the work to my peers and their managers at the end of the period.

My strong performance during the internship led to several other opportunities including a graduate position when I completed my degree. I stayed with the company for several years and learned many lessons that served me well in the corporate environment. Of the many lessons I learned, a few remain highlighted today:

• Manage expectations by under-promising and over-delivering.
• When communicating about problems, offer a solution or at least a path to finding one.
• Talk about more than just work because my colleagues are people who enjoy connection too.

At the 7-year mark, after a significant event in my personal life, I chose to pursue a job opportunity at another company. At the time I wanted to make a change to avoid a fear of over-specialisation in my role as well as occupy my mind with new experiences. I looked forward to a new challenge in an unfamiliar environment and the growth that would follow.

Joining a New Company

My second employer offered a drastically different workplace culture to the first. The dress code was casual instead of business, teams were structured with a more diverse skillset to promote autonomy and lunches were catered on Wednesdays. My ability to communicate with others as well as an enthusiasm to participate in company initiatives was regularly praised by my peers, especially since I was an engineer who broke the stereotype. The culture that the company had fostered allowed me to feel comfortable sharing more of myself than I had in the past.

Once the initial novelty of the work and environment had passed, I found myself lacking interest in the assignments I had been given. After expressing my motivation challenges to my manager, I continued to complete my work while also distracting myself with company-related side-projects that I’d created and assigned to myself. Given how comfortable I felt in the environment, I advertised what I was doing during a company talk - Deputy Munch & Learn - The Other Stuff. As company initiatives changed over time I was finally assigned to a project that was more engaging, however due to unexpected events that opportunity was short-lived.

Redundancy

In 2020, the company needed to respond to COVID-19. Like many other companies, the pandemic had a significant impact on my employer’s profitability and they elected to make my position redundant. The impact of the sudden change is something I’ll explore in a future post, however I ended up taking a month off to rest and work on some side projects. After a month of tinkering with a few ideas and making little to no progress on them, I found a job to earn money and keep myself occupied.

Contracting

I secured a 6-month contract in a booming industry, in a near-identical role to my previous job but this time with a much larger team which meant more personalities and processes to navigate. In the weeks prior I also completed an online course to improve my skills and feel more capable to perform my job than before. During this time the lockdowns and work-from-home policies had many side effects, both positive and negative.

Having new challenges meant that I was motivated to overcome them. I learned that I could manage distractions by adopting a daily practice of reflection and planning. Distractions were still a part of my day, however having a plan for how I wanted my day to unfold meant that I had enough awareness of my progress to remind myself that distractions needed to be limited. I appreciated that my previous employer had invested heavily in company culture and accepted that I couldn’t expect the same from all companies. The physical distance and lack of familiarity with my colleagues led to anxious thoughts during interactions. In November 2020, I shared my challenges with a friend and they recommended I watch a video discussing Imposter Syndrome by Healthy Gamer which explored similar topics. To my detriment I ignored the suggestion at the time.

The ongoing struggle to interact with my colleagues online caused me to consider breaking my contract on several occasions. The team was the largest I had been in and more people meant that there were more perspectives about the ‘correct’ way to solve the problems we were facing. At the time my best attempt to understand and consolidate the range of opinions was to ask others to elaborate on the reasons why their suggestions made sense to them. I lacked confidence in my approach at first as it was occasionally met with defensiveness by others in the team. The problem became even worse when the interaction took place in a written medium where it was visible to others. Over time the communication challenges wore away at me and I found myself avoiding conflict by adopting others’ suggestions without seeking to understand, just so I could get the work done. I took some key lessons away from this experience:

• Giving and receiving feedback is a complex skill:
  • Seeking clarification of received feedback is not an expression of disagreement, it is curiosity which can be expressed as a desire to understand or learn.
  • To give and receive non-trivial feedback or resolve disputes, talk to people directly to minimise everyone’s defensiveness.
• Being overly agreeable prevents growth, keep putting in effort in order to get a satisfying result from the experience.

Around the time I learned these lessons, my team and I had begun regularly meeting in the office. The change in circumstance and perspective helped to relieve the challenges I was having with work. With that comfort, a familiar dissatisfaction re-emerged. I was once again able to see that I was doing work that I wasn’t particularly interested in. As luck would have it, another job opportunity presented itself which offered many new challenges as well a first-time overlap with something I enjoyed.

Challenging Myself Again

In the software engineering discipline, keeping up with technology is usually in the job description. As I listened to a tech podcast, one of the sponsors was an independent company in the games industry advertising for a role. Excited to work for a games company, I visited the website, applied for the role and was successful after a series of interviews and a coding task.

The new role offered many new challenges and at the time I associated more challenge with more potential for reward. The technology stack and coding practices were significantly different to what I had become familiar with in previous roles. There were many new concepts I needed to understand and my time zone was 9 hours behind my colleagues. With the large time difference, we had agreed to 2 hours of overlap per day, which was at 2-4pm for them and 5-7am for me. I knew that those hours of synchronous communication would be valuable for us so I was determined to make it work. The early starts were more challenging for me than I expected, because I assumed my body-clock and social calendar would adjust. Those two incorrect assumptions meant that sleep fatigue grew to an unsustainable level by 2 months and due to a combination of tight deadlines and low performance, I was let go.

The contrast of larger, slower-moving teams in previous roles to a lean team that self-managed was exciting. I was now working with engineers who, without prompting, would articulate the reasons for their decisions in terms of practical consequences and expressed disdain for the software engineering ‘dogma’ that dominates the industry and clouds decision-making. I realised at the time that this was exactly the feeling I had in my previous role without the understanding or ability to articulate it. The dramatic change of environment meant that the lessons I learned in a short time were some of the most transformative in my career. To list a few:

• Industry ‘best practices’ are a guideline and aren’t always relevant to the goals at hand.
• Refine development plans before building - “Discussing ideas is cheaper than rewriting code.”
• The benefits of Data-oriented design in situations where resources are limited.
• Sleep deprivation turns my brain into mash potatoes.

The lessons elevated my perspective of the craft of software engineering to a level I hadn’t anticipated. The logical approach to problem-solving and discussions of ideas taught me how to distinguish between statements of objective and subjective nature. I learned that most of the ideas that were being promoted in my industry were subjective although disguised as fact. I needed to take some time off to process the new information I had obtained.

Sabbatical

Having once again found myself without a job, I reflected on the lessons I had learned from my recent experience and considered my next steps. I chose to take an indefinite break to recover from fatigue and practice some of the new skills. In an effort to put the problem-solving skills to use I attempted to complete a project of my own. This is the period that I refer to in my previous post: Learning from mistakes (I Finally Finished a Side Project). It was during this period that I decided it was finally time for me to pursue work that I enjoyed instead of inevitably finding myself in another job where I wasn’t motivated to perform. I changed strategies and shifted my priorities away from advancing my career as a software engineer, towards my passion for games.

Motivator 2 - Passion 🧩

For many years I had fantasised about developing games. As a gamer myself since an early age, I appreciate the variety of expertises that need to work in harmony to achieve an elegant result. For video games these include art, music, programming and experience design at a minimum. I made learning the initial goal and invested a few months of my sabbatical.

Once I’d established a fundamental understanding of the skills and how to practice them, I then considered options for how I might build a new career. This was motivated by a desire to turn something I’m passionate about into my career because I had heard the saying, “do something you love and you won’t work a day”. The simplest career change was to shift from software engineer to game programmer. Although many of the drawbacks of working as a software engineer would still be present, the logic here was that I’d be motivated to work in an industry that I had a passion for. I reflected on this theory and realised that once again, I didn’t have a passion for the industry at all, I just have a passion for games. A more appealing career change was to ‘Independent Game Developer’ and be able to support myself with the sales. While this was theoretically possible, it would take a significant amount of learning and improvement to reach this level. I felt I needed more time to strategise about how I was going to build a career around games, and towards the end of the year I received a call from an old colleague offering me another job.

Part-Time Role

A former colleague of mine offered me a role in their team and for the first time instead of jumping at the opportunity for a new challenge, I thought about how the opportunity might serve my goals. I considered whether accepting the role would align with my strategy to prioritise my passion. Having no income at the time, any job was appealing as it would relieve me of financial pressure. Re-entering the full-time workforce however was not appealing, as I’d grown accustomed to working on my own projects as ideas came to me. With those concerns in mind, the sensible conclusion was to request a part-time compromise.

Working part-time gave me the best of both worlds in terms of benefiting from the skills I had gained in my pursuit of achievement, as well as having free time to pursue my passions. It was around this time that I was able to reflect in much more detail about the experience I was having at work and shared my post, How I Stay Positive About Work. I felt challenged by experiences at work while also being rewarded for the effort I was investing, and slowly worked towards my goal of being an independent game developer in my free time.

Understanding Motivation

In December 2022, I sought to finally understand the underlying reason behind my low motivation for work. Recalling that Healthy Gamer was a resource I had been recommended, I found a video titled ‘What People Don’t Get About Motivation’. In this talk, Dr. Alok Kanojia (Dr. K) described that motivation is not a behaviour that is externally observable, but rather an emergent property that is created from a state of focus in the mind. The recommended strategy was to cultivate motivation internally by finding an individually tailored approach to maintain focus. Dr. K explained that mimicking the behaviour of a ‘motivated’ person is a flawed strategy as it’s based on external observations of their situation, not the conditions that created them. Following the theory, he also shared some focus meditation exercises that strengthen the mind’s ability to direct attention. The exercises were accompanied with an explaination that there have been thousands of studies that have supported the efficacy of meditation as a tool to instruct the mind and have it listen to you.

Dr. K explained the material in a step-wise, logical manner that I found intuitive. This level of understanding and explanation of complex subjects relating to the mind was something I had never witnessed before. The communication style was one that offered a clear explanation of the topic and terms being used, a systematic deconstruction of the problematic experience in the mind as well as sensible, structured solutions. I proceeded to watch more of the videos created by Healthy Gamer and gained a new perspective on many of the experiences that I was having. Through the process of applying the recommended techniques to my own life, I discovered that I had a new passion for understanding myself and improving my mental health.

In the following months I enjoyed watching more of the videos shared by Healthy Gamer. The lessons improved my understanding of my experience as they taught theory to help me understand my situation and practices that could help me alter it. I continued to experience low motivation towards my work and some days I didn’t have any personal desire to continue besides earning an income. I was able to direct my focus for short bursts but it required great effort to maintain. At this point I understood that the conditions that lead to motivation involve uninterrupted focus, so what I hoped to find was something that I would focus on enough to feel motivated. I found How to Start to Find Purpose in Your Life and within the first 5 minutes of the video I heard several descriptions that matched my experience of work. ‘Boredom due to a lack of interest’ meant that my mind was prone to fluctuating instead of remaining focused. In the talk, Dr. K shared his understanding of the fundamentals of peace and happiness. He shared that the Hindu philosopher Patanjali described peace as the cessation of fluctuations in the mind. It made me wonder whether my quest for motivation might be a milestone in a deeper quest for inner peace. I was hooked on his explanation and the new concepts that were being introduced. Dr. K described the experience of the mind in relation to peace, suffering, pleasure and pain with the following graph:

The lesson gave me a perspective that chasing pleasure may be accompanied by suffering, whereas finding peace is to be content regardless of pleasure or pain. From this I extrapolated that my efforts to follow my enjoyment of games and finding strategies to overcome challenges at work were akin to chasing pleasure and avoiding pain. I wondered whether a lasting solution might come from a strategy that helped me find peace. I sought clarification by watching ‘What Is Passion’. In this talk, Dr. K shared that passion for a career can be described by fulfillment and natural motivation, influenced by both internal and external factors. He described that passion can be cultivated through a gradual process of introspection and action. He described some exercises for introspection and grouped them within a series of dimensions. I found the following two exercises to be particularly relevant in my case:

By synthesizing the information I had gathered from this talk, I noticed that I had already intuitively been following some strategies to cultivate passion for my work. It concerned me that I couldn’t express what excited me about life so that became my next area of focus. As I watched related videos I found one that gave me my next clue, Why You Should Follow Your Dharma - Your Purpose in Life. The title of the video refers to the Eastern concept of ‘Dharma’ which can be loosely translated to ‘moral duties’. This talk opened with an exercise to “write a page about what you think is wrong with the world”. The exercise was designed to help the author discover a problem that they feel capable and therefore morally obligated to solve as a duty to the world. I first attempted this exercise in May 2023. Although I believed that every problem I listed was worth solving, I couldn’t picture myself contributing any meaningful amount to their solution. It was worth a try but I hadn’t found my answer.

After struggling to define my purpose in life, I followed the earlier advice to cultivate passion for my work through a gradual process of introspection. I focused mostly on internal factors with the aim to develop a greater sense of detachment with my relationship to work. I grew to appreciate and strengthen my ability to navigate the challenges I faced at work because of the perspective that those skills plus my technical abilities were what allowed me to perform well in my role. The flexibility I received from my job is what enabled me to continue pursuing game development as a hobby without financial pressure. My passion for improving my mental health also grew over time. I adopted practices including meditation, journalling, exercise, improved diet and an improved sleep schedule. I began having regular sessions with a counsellor to seek feedback on my methods and discuss my progress. I also advanced beyond YouTube videos as a resource and invested in a more comprehensive offering from Healthy Gamer, Dr. K’s Guide. The guide functions as a self-paced course on mental health, integrating both clinical and non-clinical perspectives with clear distinction. Much like the YouTube content, I found that it delivered information in a way that I could digest but with deeper explanation of the theory and more practical exercises including meditation techniques tailored to specific situations.

By October 2023 I had completed a sizeable portion of the Depression and Anxiety modules of Dr. K’s guide. At this point a significant amount of my personal experience of mental health had been demystified. Although I hadn’t ‘healed’ myself with this knowledge, I felt empowered with the knowledge I needed to achieve sustained improvement over time. As I reflected on my life before this resource I asked myself, “How did I not learn this earlier?”, “Why wasn’t I taught this at school?”, “What if everyone understood how their mind works?”, and with those thoughts I noticed that as a result of my journey, I was describing a fundamental problem that I once faced that was at the root of all of my suffering. From my observation, I knew that many others were still facing this problem to varying degrees and as such I felt morally obligated to contribute to the solution as a duty to the world.

Motivator 3 - Duty 🌏

The knowledge I had gained over the past few years had already begun to produce noticeable improvements in my experience of life. My relationship with myself was improving thanks to practices that helped me develop a non-judgemental understanding of myself. A healthier relationship with myself also meant a healthier relationship with everyone around me as my mind’s defence mechanisms had less control over my behaviour. Harmony with the world felt like the most peaceful experience of life that I’d had since I was a child. Having gained this life-changing knowledge, I felt compelled to share it with everyone I knew. I quickly learned that advice, especially on sensitive topics like mental health must be invited. My revised approach was to find a responsible way to share what I had learned with those who were searching for help.

The Problem

When I noticed that I had a problem finding the motivation to work I sought to find a solution. I wondered whether it was my neurological interest in puzzles that drove me to optimistically seek a solution instead of accepting my situation. The problem I had discovered along the way was that much like myself, many other people aren’t aware of the basics of how mental health works and furthermore, many aren’t aware that they aren’t aware. As a result they struggle through life battling their own mind and passing the condition onto their peers and the next generation. I looked back at my list of problems in the world and noticed that the majority of them were problems that resulted from a lack of understanding of how to manage the mind so that it doesn’t control our behaviour. I had the good fortune of having a friend who directed me to this knowledge and the free time to absorb it but many others aren’t able to do that, instead remaining stuck with the only experience that they know. I wished to help the younger version of myself who needed it and was looking for answers but didn’t know what to look for.

Building Towards the Future

While reflecting on the understanding of my new sense of purpose, I noticed that I had already begun fulfilling it in November 2021 when I shared my first post on this blog that described my relationship with mental health at the time. In the interest of taking a further step towards work I’m passionate about, I explored how I might build a career around this purpose. In my experience, psychotherapy and my own persistent research is what led to my results. With that in mind, I decided to start by working towards offering counselling services to people who are looking for help in understanding themselves and the world around them. To provide this type of help responsibly I wanted training and certification. It was through this systematic process and a fortuitous conversation with a friend that I found a suitable course in Counselling and Psychotherapy, commencing next month.

Conclusion

Having the freedom and resources to explore these topics is a privilege and I recognise how fortunate I am to be able to ponder the concepts of purpose and motivation without being limited by responsibilities and expenses beyond my means. This is one of the reasons why I feel compelled to share what I learn with anyone who might benefit.

My relationship with motivation has evolved from a subconscious drive to increase my value to a conscious approach of solving a problem that I believe is worth the ongoing effort, regardless of how difficult it may be. The perspective I’ve gained from my experiences has allowed me to discover the duty that I feel will motivate me for the next stage of my life. I see each type of motivation as having helped me discover a distinct career path. I intend to continue pursuing each of them simultaneously as they each offer their own rewards.

I believe my passion for puzzles is still at the core of helping others with their mind as each person experiences their own unique challenges. Rather than attempting to ‘solve’ anyone else, I aim to equip them with the tools they need to find their own solution because I believe I am able and therefore I must.