Internal and External Motivation

Everyone needs motivation, not in his current meaning but in the deep one: a force that makes you do what you do; we can identify two types of motivation: internal and external.

Internal motivation is about the inner part of ourselves that always speaks about purpose: what is this good for?, is there anything else in life?, what am I doing is worthy? This motivation is more related with religion and philosophy.

External motivation is about what I think I reflect myself, it could be: what people think of me or following the social norms; in an inner sense everyone have hardwired a kind of external motivation (ie. fear of missing out); this driven force is not related to the inner, instead it is rooted into our animal spirit and companies had used it to make us consume things we really don’t want: keep our attention of social media, buy something we don’t need, follow something because what others would think. This kind of motivation is driven by emotions, pleasure and fear; they act as if they were internal but in reality they aren’t and when we find out that they have no roots then we feel empty.

The distinction is easy to make, the difficulty lies in moving ourselves from the short-sight external motivations to the deep long-sight internal ones. This requires domain over ourselves, it’s easy to let one self be guided by external motivations, they don’t require neither effort nor commitment but internal motivations are durable and makes life meaningful. Our current society not only let itself be guided by external motivations but promotes them; it is fight that we need to win inside ourselves.