#oneaday, Day 53: Mr Motivation

Motivation is a curious beast. And it’s not a case of either “having it” or “not having it”, there are many complex factors involved. And sometimes, apparently, blind chance.

Take today. I got my ass soundly kicked by a boss in Final Fantasy XIII (which I am enjoying a lot so a big middle finger to all of you who hate it) so instead of swearing profusely and trying again, I swore profusely, turned off the PS3, said to myself (silently, because saying it out loud with no-one else nearby would just be weird) “I’m going to go and run 10km now,” and then went and ran 10km. I’d say “just like that” but it took over an hour and a half, and anything over a couple of minutes is automatically disqualified from “just like that” status.

Anyway, casual bragging that I’ve achieved my goal of running 10K aside, I find that sudden bursts of motivation like that happen at the strangest of times… and it’s very difficult to force them. Impossible, in fact. They’re a spur-of-the-moment, impulsive sort of thing… which makes it rather inconvenient when you actually need some motivation to do something.

Part of the issue is, of course, prior successes. My running has been a slow but sure upward slope of little victories, one step at a time, and so that has provided ample motivation to continue and keep pushing myself to the next milestone, no pun intended. Contrast this with the jobhunting, on the other hand, which has been a string of ignorance, incompetence and idiocy—none of which was my fault—and it’s understandable how I may be feeling a little disheartened on that particular front. Still, I am cracking on with it and have yet another bunch of applications in now. It remains to be seen if anything will come of these ones. Some of them, again, are even relevant to what I want to do, though the pay is all over the place. I’m kind of taking the opinion now that any money coming in is better than no money, particularly if the job in the question offers a potentially good “foot in the door” for other Good Things. Which at least one of the things I’ve applied for does.

So we shall see. But it has been a long time since I’ve felt that same surge of motivation for the jobhunting than I have for the running. Perhaps it’s because of the difference between something I want to do and something I have to do. No-one likes feeling obliged to do things—given the opportunity, most people would rather be able to stay in bed as long as they like and then spend their days doing any combination of eating pies, playing video games, watching TV, staring at the Internet, wandering through fields of flowers, driving expensive cars very fast, wanking, listening to music, smashing Justin Bieber albums over the heads of people they don’t like very much, giving and/or receiving oral sex, smoking weed, drawing pictures and eating Lindor chocolates—and so anything that you need to do that gets in the way of doing those things that you want is automatically parsed by your brain as being an inconvenience.

Perhaps I just need to want to find a job more. For that to happen, though, I need to spot the Awesomest Job Ever That Is A Complete Shoe-In For My Appointment And That No-One Else Will Ever Apply For.

What’s that? AwesomeTech are looking for a “Playing Final Fantasy In Bed Technician Called Pete” for £50,000 a year? I’m so there.

Sigh. A man can dream, huh?