4. ON THEROAD
motivation
Leadership starts from your vision. That is what motivates
you. But what is motivation? Another abstraction. Another of
these strange words like ‘leadership’! It could be argued that
there is no such thing as motivation; it does not exist as an
independent quality, but is something we ascribe to people
who want to do things. It reminds me of a play written by the
seventeenth-century French playwright Molière as a savage
satire on the medical opinion of the day. In this play, a panel
of highly revered doctors speculates on the reason why
opium puts people to sleep. They think about the question
carefully and after much learned argument come to the con-
clusion that opium puts people to sleep because it contains
a ‘dormitive principle’. In other words, it puts people to
sleep because it put people to sleep. A description has
become an explanation. Likewise, ‘motivation’ does not
explain anything – just think of it as a useful shorthand for
the energy that comes from opening the gap between where
you are and where you want to be. You can’t measure it,
touch it, see it, hear it, smell it or taste it, but you can sense
it in people who know what they want and are prepared to
go for it. It shows in their voices, you see it in their eyes.
This energy can either come predominantly from without
- extrinsic motivation – or from within – intrinsic motivation
- and can flow in four different ways: