RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us

The pictures are adorable, and I love them. I commend the creativity behind this video! But listen to the message. I deal with defining motivations every day. It’s the single most frustrating thing about my work life. After you watch this, think about what you do. Think about why you do it. Then think about how you try to motivate others to do things. Think about the work output when the motivation isn’t a purpose.

Does a light bulb turn on?

What is the story in its purest form? 

T.S. Eliot - On Poetry

Sometimes I get so absorbed in what’s new that I forget about what’s always been true. Humans are funny creatures. We have certain experiences and then create symbols to represent them. But what does the word “love” mean to someone who’s never really experienced it? Is there really just one kind of love, or do we need more words to capture the richness of human experience?

In everyday talk, we throw around words like their meaning is self evident. In poetry, words are used to create an effect upon the reader. You’re not referring to a concept, you’re creating a feeling.

The following is extracted from T.S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets”. It’s from a passage where he reflects upon his work. To experience the full effect, read it out loud and visualize the images in your head. Maybe that’s obvious advice, but I never thought to do it until recently, and it has made all the difference for me. You really gotta give poetry your rapt attention to get the generous rewards it has to offer.

Four Quartets:

And so each new venture
Is a new beginning, and a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate - but there is no competition-
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I love the surprise ending, and I think all of us citizens of the Internet can learn something from it. When we make our art (our blog posts, our pictures, our tweets, etc) we can only try to create a positive experience for the looker. But the rest isn’t our business. If by chance a good reader happens upon our blog, and leaves an insightful and gracious comment, then good for us. But it’s out of our control.

“For us, there is only the trying.”

There is neither happiness nor unhappiness in this world; there is only the comparison of one state with another. Only a man who has felt ultimate despair is capable of feeling ultimate bliss. It is necessary to have wished for death in order to know how good life is to live.

— Alexandre Dumas (1802 - 1870), The Count of Monte Cristo

Eastern Wisdom, Modern Life by Alan Watts

A couple years ago, I became interested in Buddhism. I went to the store, bought the typical books, and started meditating. I lost interest after a week or so. You could call it a textbook example of a passing phase.

Fast forward to this spring. I’m reading Nietzsche for class, and this suspicion wells up inside me that a lot of his ideas are very similar to those you might find in the Tao Te Ching - especially the idea that the universe isn’t what we normally see it as; we tend to confuse our conceptual maps with the territory itself.

I wanted to look into Buddhism again, with a fresh pair of eyes, so I grabbed the old books off the shelf, but when I sat down and read for awhile, I began to realize why I lost interest in the first place: eastern texts are hard to understand. The poetry of the works is beautiful, but it doesn’t help me grasp the concepts. I needed some point of entry. 

Enter Alan Watts. I won’t say much about his works (which are incredibly lucid and easy to understand), but I will make a suggestion. If you want to understand eastern philosophies, start here. For me, it opened up a new world of wisdom that was previously impenetrable.

Steve Jobs Stanford Commencement Speech 2005

I’ve always believed in the power of stories. Here, in front of a crowd of potentially 12,000 impressionable students, and to later be viewed online by countless others, Steve shares three of his own stories. Steve’s stories are intimate, traumatic and heavy. Despite this, he shares them with ease. To Steve, life just is…trust it.

Wisdom: the art of knowing what to overlook

— William James

At the end he plays something that literally made me cry it was so beautiful. But it only works if you listen carefully to the whole talk. Context is everything.

Not a neurosis, but an achievement. Fancy that!