Creativity and Motivation

In order to be creative, you have to be motivated. Motivated to create, to work, to follow your passions, to live with a little spunk. Motivation is what drives us to do what we do each day, whether we like it or not.

You've got crappy motivations and awesome motivations and everything in between. There is a trend seen amongst successful people. Not just successful people, but with people who have a genuine satisfaction in what they do. 

Build these awesome motivations in your life and watch success flow! And then be satisfied with it!

Sound familiar?? College maybe??

1. Autonomy

Autonomy is when you are motivated by self direction. You are self governed and push yourself to accomplish something instead of rewards or punishments from others. It becomes important to you to do things for your own sake. Choose to push yourself through school assignments because you want to learn and not for the A. Choose to make your work assignment perfect so that you can be proud of the outcome. Choose to pursue your passion in life and not just what makes you money.

Lets say your boss at work tells you to do some research for a project and then create a report on your findings and show it to him in a week. Now, you can do that assignment because you FEAR that if you don't, you'll get fired. You can do that assignment because you know it's just your job, it's your DUTY in the position you hold. But these reasons don't have enough substance to get you very far. When you finally decided to do the assignment because you truly WANT to do it, you then tap into the best motivation you can find. This self direction, self governing technique is self empowering.

The best source of motivation is self-generated!

2. Self Mastery

Self Mastery is a huge motivator. Do what you do because it is improving yourself. It's all about doing things in order to become better at it. There's a certain amount of healthy self-satisfaction that comes when we work on our own self mastery. It always seems like the "greats" of any respected field of work were driven by self mastery, always wanting to learn more and more.

I had a man come to one of my college classes and tell us about his business and how it all started. He began by helping his parent's small website out with their social media marketing when they couldn't afford a professional service. He spent hours upon hours just learning by trial and error and eventually knew enough to grow his parents online presence to the point that it significantly raised their profits. He now works for himself and has more then 70 employees doing the very thing he did for his parents, working for dozens of major companies. What's motivating him now? He still reads about 4 hours of marketing/ business tactical material each night in order to continue to master what he does. THAT is what is making him successful.

3. Purpose Driven

Rather then jumping into a job, a major, or a lifestyle that brings little purpose to your life, try focusing your passion and skills on a purpose that is important to you. A purpose-driven individual will always work past a roadblock while the purposeless individual will quit. Some of the greatest most successful entrepreneurs of today are those that start their business with a bigger purpose in mind. Without purpose you lose direction. Without direction it's hard to look past the failures and stumbling blocks that come your way. Steve Ells, founder of Chipotle, almost lost his restaurants due to tough critics early in his business. But, his passion and purpose of bringing fresh ingredients in a simple way to his customers kept him afloat. They are now one of the largest growing restaurant chains in the bizz!  Purpose is the strength needed to go for something seemingly impossible.

Her purpose was to pet the bear... so she pet the bear!

These motivating factors have been taught to me through several different channels, however nothing seems to explain so well how they work and why they work, then this awesome video. It's worth ten and a half minutes of your time, trust me! Dan Pink, the speaker in this short clip, is a motivational pro who has done many studies and written a couple books on what motivates everyone at the workplace and at home. Enjoy!

The most creative people I know are the ones that are motivated by at least one of these things, sometimes all three. Drive yourself to becoming more.

 It's a God given gift to become something more then we are.