Motivation

Here, in America, we all work so hard - well, most of us, anyway. So what is it that keeps us going? I've thought about this for various professional exercises where they made me think about the great days I've had at work. What were the most stimulating & challenging times I had. Again and again, I come back to this - I am happy when I am working hard and achieving something. For the past 2-3 weeks, work has been a complete grind. I've been up well past midnight on most nights and then constantly busy in the office from 9-5. Had a great presentation yesterday and even though I got home only around 8, it felt good. It actually felt great - I had been working hard on this presentation and it went off great and that made it all worth it.

7 year old's probably have a different perspective on work & enjoyment. Arjun, my 7 year old, can whip through his math problems pretty easily. But the writing part has him stuck like glue. He dawdles and sits there - yesterday, he went an hour and wrote 2 words - seriously, 2 words on the page. We've bullied and threatened him and of course, that doesn't work. When does it ever? As I was losing my patience with him again last night - as he drank his 4th glass of water in 10 minutes - while I was supervising his writing, it struck me. Maybe its just too big of a body of work for him to grasp. I had asked him to write 2 pages on a wedding we just went to. I changed that and asked him to do 2 sentences instead.
"2 sentences?" he was incredulous.
"Yes, just 2."
"I can do more - I can do 3, no 4. Actually, I'll keep writing till I run out of sentences." He literally transformed before my eyes and attacked his work. He ended up writing a half page but I'm happy with that. We're going to do that more regularly till he masters the half page and then move on to more.
So, of course, it's all about knowing your audience and positioning accordingly.