Finding Your Motivation

Tom Jepson
Sep 5, 2018 · 2 min read

I woke up yesterday morning and was unsure about how I was going to get anything done: the fire to hit the day head on felt like it had gone out compared to where it had been blazing in the days before.

This mindset shift begged the question:

In the face of any kind of adversity, how do you find your motivation to get going?

You might be facing challenges at work, or maybe there is something trying at home that is weighing on your consciousness. It might just be that you slept a little funny and got out of bed on the wrong side! Not every adverse event is a giant mountain to be climbed but to everyone it is still something.

It struck me that, when tasked with working out what you have to do each day (as I do every day — the joy and terror of autonomous, decentralised working), how do you really go about setting the goals for yourself? How do you know when you’ve truly achieved something? At what point are the payoffs which can carry you forward a reality?

These felt like particularly big questions to be asking at 6:15AM on a Tuesday…

I have, recently, been reading the excellent book ‘Hippo — The Human-Focussed Digital Book’ by Pete Trainor. It’s given me a lot of food for thought around designing things for people (not just users) and is grounded in the motivations of human beings and their needs. Part of one chapter is centred around happiness as a driver to motivation and progress.

The book highlights that dopamine gives us a little glow — a happiness boost, if you will — when we are on our road to success. The author goes on to state that, by designing incremental steps into any process (a road on which we can succeed) we give users (people, humans, ourselves) the potential to experience micro-rewards — happiness boosts — on their way to achieving their grand goal.

It got me thinking: how can I find happiness in each of the small jobs — those incremental steps — in everything I do each day? How do these add up to my ‘big picture’ goals? If small steps bring small rewards to increase happiness and happiness increases motivation, how can I harness that potential?

It isn’t practical — or, arguably, human! — to add immense levels of granularity to every last thing that you do and pick apart each tiny ‘metric’ that you could call a goal. It is, however, possible to remain mindful of the things you do throughout a day and truly acknowledge when you’ve ‘achieved’ something — when those little moments after you’ve put your pen down or set aside your keyboard leave you with that warm glow; that feeling of ‘Yes, I’ve done well here’.

Be kind to yourself. Whether you know it or not, you are achieving things every second of the day.

Tom Jepson

Written by

UX Consultant and company-of-one. Coffee enthusiast. Spare-time musician.

Welcome to a place where words matter. On Medium, smart voices and original ideas take center stage - with no ads in sight. Watch
Follow all the topics you care about, and we’ll deliver the best stories for you to your homepage and inbox. Explore
Get unlimited access to the best stories on Medium — and support writers while you’re at it. Just $5/month. Upgrade