For someone who has no objective, nothing is relevant. (Confucius)
After the incubation stage
The knowledge that you are motivated, have achieved a sense of competency and purpose, and have earned respect from your peers is overwhelmingly powerful. Aligning this with your childlike mind, which absorbs new information, helps dispel any negative voices you might experience. You gain something new to live for rather than just something to deal with.
Set aside a little time every day to exercise the incubation stage. Develop the habit of paying attention to your observations throughout the day. Identify what kind of negativity hinders you and work to strengthen your motivation. This will help you develop greater trust in your motivation process and instinctively turn to it when confronted with apathy and negativity.
It might also be helpful to exchange ideas or discuss your incubation stages with a friend or someone you trust. Discussing and exchanging your ideas can create further enthusiasm. Powerful incubation stages can provide some of the most emotionally charged and richest moments of your life.
Keep a journal to analyze and reflect on the small incubation processes. Writing about your experiences during the incubation stage increases the likelihood of recapturing them. As you pay more attention to your motivation process, it tends to become a beneficial habit. This will create a general awareness that leads to greater enjoyment of your life and the people in it. This motivating spirit can improve collaboration and communication with others. The principle is simple: motivation increases as you become more aware of your own motivating spirit. The more you experience your motivating spirit and gain confidence, the more motivated you will become.
Continue Tapping into Your Flair
We believe that when you were a child, you had a flair for something, a talent. If your parents were supportive of that talent, you would have become an expert in it. Talent is the natural propensity to produce great work in a particular domain. Mozart, for example, had an innate ability to listen to music, understand it, and produce outstanding compositions from an early age.
However, without parental support, even the most promising talent can languish. Conversely, with proper skill development, even average talent can become the basis for motivation and creativity. In these little incubation stages, you need to tap into this flair repeatedly, developing the skills to imagine a diverse range of possibilities and the ability to turn things over in your mind.
Many of these skills involve being willing to take risks and having the courage to find your flair and passion, or to try something new. Intrinsic motivation, the urge to do something for sheer pleasure rather than for any reward, is key. Real motivation forms when people are motivated by pure enjoyment of what they are doing. A Nobel Prize-winning physicist once noted that the difference between creative and uncreative scientists was whether their work was “a labor of love.”
Competency and Satisfaction
Competency is one of the main components of satisfaction in life. No one can achieve lasting self-esteem without competency. Research at the University of Missouri found that competency was high on the list of satisfying life elements. Talents, however, are not required; passion is.
The most motivated and accomplished scientists are often not the most gifted but those driven by childlike curiosity and passion. A strong passion can compensate for a lack of raw talent. Passion is like the fire that keeps motivation boiling over and over again.
To develop a true sense of competency, you don’t need to be the best or the most gifted; you just need to feel good at what you do and do it with passion. You might teach someone what it means to have passion, perhaps your child, who learns your passion from you.
Feeling competent at something makes you more likely to stick to it and possibly excel at it. You may receive more praise and feel even better about your abilities. However, from the point of view of healing apathy and finding motivation, any “objective” scale of excellence is irrelevant. Happiness depends on being able to do things that make you feel competent.
On Becoming An Artist
Professor Ellen Langer, in her book On Becoming An Artist, says: “Would Mozart have been able to compose great music if he had been born and raised in China, where atonal sounds are appreciated? If Picasso had been born in Bali, would there have been a point to his art? To be talented in art means what? Consider Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, Miro, Mondrian, and Rembrandt. They are all thought to be very talented, but their work has little in common. When we say we have no talent for art, with whom are we comparing ourselves? John Donne was a very cerebral poet; E. E. Cummings was wonderfully playful; and Emily Dickinson was mostly emotional. When we say we can’t write poetry, with which of these talents are we comparing ourselves? The music of John Cage is quite different from that of Mozart, whose music bears hardly any resemblance to Chinese opera. Tiger Woods, Serena Williams, and the jockey Jose Santos use different muscles in different ways, yet they are all great athletes. Each of these domains—art, poetry, music, and sport—is multidimensional. To our detriment, we tend to reduce them to a single understanding when we speak of the talent they require.”
Authenticity is all I seek in my painting. If I am authentic, I am necessarily original. Will there be an audience that appreciates the originality? Yes or no, but that question doesn’t determine whether there is talent operating. Even those who today we are certain were talented—such as Manet, van Gogh, or Pollock—had no audience at first. Each new movement in art, or any paradigm shift in any discipline, is initially rejected. Would we say these artists were not talented because they lacked audience appreciation? Of course not. We see their talent because of how we were taught to see it, not because it is a foregone conclusion that they were talented or that we are not.
A Study on Belief and Perception
Scientists have found a link between what we expect to see and what our brain tells us we actually saw. The study, published in the journal PLoS Computational Biology, reveals that the context surrounding what we see is crucial, sometimes overriding the evidence gathered by our eyes and even causing us to imagine things that aren’t really there.
Using a mathematical model, researchers Li Zhaoping and Li Jingling at University College London determined that a vague background context is more influential and helps us fill in more blanks than a bright, well-defined context. This may explain why we are prone to seeing imaginary shapes in shadows when the light is poor.
Eighteen observers were asked to concentrate on the center of a black computer screen. Every time a buzzer sounded, they pressed one of two buttons to record whether or not they had seen a small, dim, gray “target” rectangle in the middle of the screen. It did not appear every time, but when it did, it was displayed for just 80 milliseconds.
“People saw the target much more often if it appeared in the middle of a vertical line of similar-looking gray rectangles, compared to when it appeared in the middle of a pattern of bright white rectangles,” said Zhaoping. “They even registered ‘seeing’ the target when it wasn’t actually there. This is because people are mentally better prepared to see something vague when the surrounding context is also vague. It made sense for them to see it, so that’s what happened. When the target didn’t match the expectations set by the surrounding context, they saw it much less often.”
As we have learned, authenticity, mindfulness, and passion are key elements in developing motivation and creativity. Whether through setting aside time for incubation stages, journaling, or discussing ideas with trusted friends, these practices help strengthen motivation and foster a creative and fulfilling life.