Inspiration vs. Motivation

"Inspiration is short-lived. It’s typically emulating other people, and it’ll push us for a week or two. But inspiration begins to extinguish quite quickly. And as Henry Ford once said, after that it’s 90 percent hard work. Inspiration may get us started, but it never keeps us going. And that’s where motivation works.  

And motivation doesn’t come in a bottle. Motivation is, scientifically speaking, a series of small behaviors."

Apparently this is quote week. This one comes from John Norcross via Rob Walker of Murketing. It's a fantastically interesting way to think about what's wrong with advertising today, constantly trying to inspire the consumer to buy in fleeting forms, without doing the generally harder and more difficult to measure work of consistently motivating a person to purchase.

Rob probably said it better (that's why he's got that fancy job at the NYTimes)

"Anyway, I guess I wonder if all the inspiration offered by gurus is a bit of a disservice. It’s like a jolt of caffeine; it won’t last. (It’s another variation of the instant-ness problem I wrote about the other day, maybe.) You’ll feel briefly like you’re on a new path, but it fades. You get pumped up and “inspired,” and then before long you’re right back where you were … needing “inspiration” again."

(Feel free to stop reading here - the rest of this is just thinking out loud)

***

All of this makes me wonder what we actually value as a society. We like to think it's the underdog story, the guy who works his way up from nothing to the top. But is that what we really value in practice? 

Gladwell touches on this in Outliers. We imagine these great people as if they were born to do what they do. Not so much that they fell into success, but that it was somehow pre-destined for them. And in doing so we discount the serious work that it took to succeed, as well as the help that pushed them to what they become.

Or consider Tony Romo after the very sad defeat the Cowboys were handed yesterday. He started off the year a brilliant underdog story, a guy that worked his way up from a small town, to division 2 college football, to barely making the team as an undrafted rookie free agent. But now the hard work story is rather worthless, lost to a single average season.

Or stock prices. An entire financial system based on short-term returns, often at the expense of longer-term gains. Last night I heard a pundit talking about how next year probably won't be so bad because we'll be rolling over this year's sales. So even if next year still sucks, the comps will probably be positive, and stocks go up. Or when a new CEO is hired, he or she lays off 20% of the staff, closes a few stores - and the stocks go up. Doesn't mean they'll make any more money or be much healthier in reality, but stocks go up, discounting the much more difficult job of actually making a company viable again.

The point is maybe what we really value is the winning, but we don't really give a shit about how we do it, no matter what story we tell ourselves. Maybe it's all just based on envy. Everyone envies the end result, but not necessarily for the sacrifice that it took to create it, so we choose to discount the difficult bits as it might negatively affect the story of what we tell ourselves success looks like.

Anyway - probably neither here nor there, but something to think about.

Comments

[Mike Arauz]

I love that quote at the top, Paul.

Funny, it's something we've been going on about at Undercurrent, and it touches on the subject of Helge's post this morning: http://www.180360720.no/?p=684

When we think about marketing through social media, we need to shift our focus from impressions and other short-term gains to sustaining long-term relationships.

Anyone who's had any success building up their personal brand across the social web knows it takes a lot of patience and devotion. It doesn't happen overnight.

Gonna have to put some thoughts together on this...

[Brett Duncan]

To your point on success, I think we like the idea of much of it being predestined because we need something/someone to blame other than ourselves for why we aren't successful. "It just isn't in the cards . . . ."