ON MOTIVATION

During the million or so interviews I've conducted over the past several months, one question I was required to ask was "What motivates you?" And, despite hearing similar-but-not-the-same answers over and over (and over and over) again, I don't know that I have a good answer for my personal motivation.

Generally speaking, I am not a competitive person. I am a sore loser and smug winner, which makes the competition less pleasant. I've also found that some people are just jerks during competition - granted, some of this competition has been of the Halo 3 Xbox Live variety, and Xbox Live has more jerks per capita than Jerksville, North Jerkalina. So I don't really know that it's any particular competitive fire that drives me.

Some people are seeking to make their parents proud. And I'm sure that's part of what motivates me - not just to make my parents proud, but to make everyone who knows me proud in some way or another. However, I feel like a jerk saying that pride motivates me, because so many negative consequences go with the idea of pride. (It goes before a fall, it's a forgettable White Lion album, etc.)

In my job, there aren't always tangible results. So I can't say that the feeling of accomplishment drives me, because it's much more difficult to measure results when working with people. So it can't be that.

I don't know. I feel like those were the big three answers I got from people (over the course of like 60 interviews). And none of them really summarize why I try at all: why I worked hard in school, why I try to be likable, why I try to do any more than the bare minimum at all.

Look at it like this: I could write a blog post riddled with mistakes - typos, factual inaccuracies, etc. And no one would say anything, because it's the Internet, and there's a different standard for communication. So why do I bother? What is this stupid internal force that makes me spell things correctly?