Luckily enough, it’s a Sunday morning as I write this, so it’s not like I have to be at my best to face the world.  I eventually managed to drop back off to sleep by just letting my mind wander – I was fretting about a couple of issues and these will pop up in what I have to present.  But here goes…

My currently reading is H.G. Wells The Sleeper Awakes so thoughts about insomnia – not a good subject if you’re struggling for sleep, so I forced myself to think about all the football matches that I have ever attended.  From that I thought about mowing the lawn – we’ve just had the ride on mower back from being serviced, so I’d done that yesterday – good job too as it’s raining now, as indeed it was over night.  Then I though about the problems we’re having with the septic tank – it’s a long story, I won’t bore you.  Then I though about a particular day in the summer of 1988 on my last day working in a local creamery in order to get some pennies before going off to University – this memory always comes up whenever I let my mind wander.  From that I got to a particular day at University – we’d all been out on the lash and some of ‘our lads’ had been in a fight… This then got me to thinking about playing cricket with University friends, then I got into that whole 1981 Ashes series – replaying the best bits in my head (mostly Bob Willis charging in like a bull and Botham swatting the ball around like it was a fly).

I think that was about it, the next thing that I remember was my wife waking me and telling me that she’d not slept brilliantly.  She was off out to a carboot sale, with our eldest – he’s planning to go to Cambodia and he needs to raise £3,000 and selling his junk (sorry… ‘items he no longer wants’) is one of his ideas for raising it.  And because of the rain, they were only going to look for stock to sell on eBay – but since then they’ve called and because the sun’s come out they’re staying to sell that stuff that we packed into the car yesterday afternoon, when it was lovely and sunny…

Motivation is a difficult thing.  It’s a slippery as an eel to define, my dictionary says it can mean either ‘supply a motive’ or ‘be the motive of’.  It then goes on to suggest that it could mean either ‘to cause (a person) to act in a particular way’ or ‘to stimulate the interest…’  Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds a little paradoxical.

I’m going to give you a definition of my own…. I believe that motivation cannot be external.  It has to come from within. Others can help you to motivate yourself, but they cannot do it for you – you cannot be motivated by a third party.  It’s impossible.  Why is it impossible?  Well I reckon that you need to consider Newton’s Laws of Physics.

His First Law states that a ‘body will persist in a state of uniform motion or of rest unless acted upon by an external force.’  On the face of it, this seems to blow my definition apart.  HOWEVER, think about it.  If we say that motivation is  our force, then this force is required CONSTANTLY.  As soon as it is stopped being applied then our body will come to rest.  This is borne out by the Second Law which states that ‘Force is equal to Mass times Acceleration.’  If there is no acceleration then there’s no Force.

The Third Law is the clincher.  ‘To every action there is an equal and opposite reaction’.  Even if motivation (Force) could be applied externally, the reaction to it would be negative.  So it HAS to come from within.  The motivation for us doing anything has to be personal, otherwise we will only react negatively against it.