Motivation

whats my, like, motivation, man…?

I start work, I make a coffee, I drink coffee while scanning slack messages and perhaps write one of my own.

It’s quiet. It’s been quiet since layoffs a few months ago. We aren’t building a rocket-ship, we are building our own coffins.

Groggily I sit back and decide to open LinkedIn, in the hopes that I will be saved by some Christlike recruiter, who will say, “thank goodness we found you, only you can help us with building this spaceship and sending it to the moon”. A little far fetched, sure, but a boy can dream.

It’s funny, even the building a starship could be dull or tedious — imagine working for Elon — conversely being part of the production line for aglets may end up being engaging and fulfilling.

The nature of working or “doing a job” depends on a few different factors which help us, as social primates, ascribe value and purpose to our time spent doing them.

The key message here, is that these factors below are all drivers of our own perception and emotion, how we feel rather than what we do or how we do it.

Impact

You must personally feel like you make a difference. This is so important. It doesn’t have to be that you are changing the world by ending war, though I’m sure that’d help drive your motivation, but simply just that you make colleagues and coworkers time at work better in a way you can clearly see. “Better” here is doing a lot of heavy lifting, let me expound.

You can be a real asshole slavedriver, cracking the whip and making life miserable for others buuuutt you perceive that you are getting more out of them, thus you are making use of their time better.

I don’t ascribe to this viewpoint and would much rather my team feel happy, engaged and autonomous but that’s not the point of this factor. The point is that you feel like you are making a positive impact.

However you choose to measure that positive impact is down to your own values and beliefs which are separate to the emotional drivers that we need to be engaged in order to have a fulfilling work life.

Focus

No one likes working on something that they aren’t engaged with. Even people with dumb repetitive jobs, like accountants, experience flow; the feeling of utter focus and “mastery” of your tasks. Experiencing this throughout your work day is important to ensuring your motivation and engagement is kept high.

Also, surprisingly enough, people tend to do good work when they are focused without being stressed, who knew ?

The opposite of focused might be diffuse or scattered; where a laser produces a single focused column of light, a light bulb creates an omni directional stream of chaotic electromagnetic radiation.

While both forms of light may have the same energy, they have drastically different effects. One illuminates and one pin points.

Being a lightbulb and touching too many points and trying to keep track of all the things, whilst sometimes a useful role to play, is most definitely draining.

Focusing by letting your mind occupy a single spot and absorb the minutiae of a project; letting your creativity or mastery lead you in figuring out a singular task, keeps you engaged and motivated. Curiosity is one hell of a way to keep your engine firing and keeping you in charge of your own work.

Pull the threads and solve each challenge as it arises, don’t ask for permission or clarity — make mistakes and fail forwards.

Culture

The people that you work with and how your relationships work is such a key part to keeping your motivation up and your batteries charged. It’s a lot easier working with people who you enjoy talking to, or at the very least, it’s easier when you understand the parameters of the interaction.

It can be frustrating and difficult to switch social codes, change audience contexts and work with folks who don’t share a common vision.

It makes work and life more fun when you and your team can have a bit of fun. Whether you can chat about hobbies or share a bit of craic, it’s fulfilling on a personal level to find some common ground.

Being magnanimous and understanding is, in my opinion, of incredible import when building rapport with others. It’s far more powerful to have people want to do something because they admire and respect you rather than because they have to through fear or obligation.

If shared experience and language are the building blocks of team culture then respect is the foundation. Fundamentally almost all healthy relationships are built on respect. In functions beneath tolerance and loyalty. It feeds belief and confidence; creating an environment where people can grow, makes it much easier for those who will.

Oppression and rule-by-fear may create loyalty, but it will stunt those who are subject to it, eventually distorting and damaging them, as well as their oppressor, who learns nothing other than how to disfigure their own toys.

Spoiler

I’m not feeling all these things at my current job.

I like my team, we aren’t perfect but we have fun and seem to be able to solve the wide dearth of problems that come our way. I don’t want to let the guys down. If they have any family stuff to do — it’s never a problem to shirk work and do that. Family comes first.

The wider culture is a bit less forgiving, lots of layoffs, unpaid sick leave (so don’t tell HR if you’re sick…) and a general disconnect/dictation from senior management.

A lack of vision leads to a feeling of zero impact. A lack of strategy creates a constantly unfocused environment (nothing is urgent, if nothing actually is…).

Lastly, though I’m proud of our incredibly bloated do-all-the-things enterprise API that we’ve produced over the last few years (and I have learned a lot about a lot while doing it), the impact I feel on a daily basis is absent now.

So much was crammed into the project to do cover all manner of things, and ultimately to continue to survive as a standalone service that now its complexity has increased and it’s singular function has widened in scope.

It’s all custard anyway…

My role, is to cajole my team into slapping this hot stack of custard into a form that we can all agree looks pleasing and meets requirements — meanwhile we must continue to slap.

Like some non-Newtonian liquid, we keep this sloppy structure turgid, for, without our collective slapping, it will melt back into the primordial custardy goodness from whence it came.

I think I’m a bit fed up being chief custard slapper now and would like to go back to inventing different types of custard to slap.

That’s where I get my energy, creating and setting up stuff — once it’s alive and people “get it” and can use it, I’m happy. I want to create the next thing that people can “get” and begin the process over again.

And maybe if I do it right, there won’t be any custard at all, but a rigid iron cube that needs no slapping to perform its duties…