Quotes about Motivation

A life without a purpose is a languid, drifting thing. Every day we ought to renew our purpose, saying to ourselves: This day let us make a sound beginning, for what we have hitherto done is nought.

Now in matters of action the reason directs all things in view of the end:

Seeing my name in the newspapers after winning the national junior championship motivated me to win more medals and I have never looked back since then.

You can talk all you want about having a strategy for your life, understanding motivation, and balancing aspirations with unanticipated opportunities. But ultimately, this means nothing if you do not align those with where you actually expend your time, money, and energy. In other words, how you allocate resources is where the rubber meets the road.

If you get motivators at work, Herzberg's theory suggests, you're going to love your job—even if you're not making piles of money. You're going to be motivated.

They are always motivated to go up-market, and almost never motivated to defend the new or low-end markets that the disruptors find attractive. We call this phenomenon asymmetric motivation. It is the core of the innovator's dilemma, and the beginning of the innovator's solution.

If you work to understand what job you are being hired to do, both professionally and in your personal life, the payoff will be enormous.

It is hard to overestimate the power of these motivators—the feelings of accomplishment and of learning, of being a key player on a team that is achieving something meaningful.

They died less from lack of food or medicine than from lack of hope, lack of something to live for.

The pleasure principle is an artificial creation of psychology. Pleasure is not the goal of our aspirations, but the consequence of attaining them.

Man's search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life and not a secondary rationalization of instinctual drives.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." I can see in these words a motto which holds true for any psychotherapy. In the Nazi concentration camps, one could have witnessed that those who knew that there was a task waiting for them to fulfill were most apt to survive. The same conclusion has since been reached by other authors of books on concentration camps, and also by psychiatric investigations into Japanese, North Korean and North Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camps.