Procrastination vs Motivation

I often wonder why it is some days I wake up, full of energy, have breakfast with my family all smiles and sunshine. I arrive at the office, the day is a flurry of to-do list decimation and output. In the evening I enjoy dinner with my family and later fall into a deep happy slumber content with my day. The problem is the following morning I wake up late, tear strips off my face as I rush shave and go to work looking like 2000yr old corpse just pulled from the Siberian permafrost.

My work day is spent wishing away the minutes and hiding from any form of productive activity. I have an argument with my wife in the evening and decide to stay up late drinking.

Why is one day the polar opposite of the other, they could easily follow on from each other, Monday happy, happy, happy, Tuesday Dr Death?

What is it about my motivation which allows such swings. Is there a difference between motivation and mood?

What is motivation?

A simple definition is the minimization of pain and the maximization of pleasure but I think it’s more deep rooted than that, some days I simply can’t be bothered and other days I want to conquer the world and there is no other external differences to the day.

Its 30 years since Mark Chapman decided to take a gun to the Dakota Building in New York and murder John Lennon, why? What was the motivation here? It’s easy to say he is a mental, a mental with a gun or even worse still, he was a motivated mental with a gun. Yes I am sure he has some form of psychiatric disease but a lot of people have that problem, I am sure to some extent we are all a little unhinged. Instant fame? He was a nothing man, a nobody going nowhere and the few seconds it took to change the world of music guaranteed we still know his name 30years after the tragic event.

Simply writing it off as an act of madness is convenient and simple but it would be the same as saying it was because God willed it, doesn’t really explain anything other than allow us to move on and ignore it. Is it random or can we as individuals, increase or decrease the levels of our own intrinsic motivation? Is it learned or genetically inherited?

I don’t know the answers to these questions but I do know that when I hire someone motivation or perceived enthusiasm is very high on my list. Be careful with this approach though, an idiot with motivation is simply a motivated idiot.
Take this blog for example, its now been nearly 3 months since I made an entry. Why do I sometimes post 3 entries per month then other times leave it for 3 months to do another?

Its one of those things which becomes self fulfilling - I haven’t done anything for so long now, one more day wont matter. Smoking is the same, if I smoke one cigarette in an evening then 30 more wont do any harm, I have broken the smoking rule anyhow – in for a penny. Its nonsensical I know but I never said my brain was straightforward.

Perhaps the fact that I have the motivation to think and write about motivation tells me everything I need to know.

It’s a bit sad and I should simply stop, now.