CHAPTER 4: The DEMOCRATIC (R)EVOLUTION We are better than we realize we are. For the first time, we can now create institutions of governance that elicit our best. Copyright 2026 by Paul L. LaClair
Value for Monday of Week 34 in the season of Interlude
Being Motivated and Driven
Motivation is an internal striving, which can lead us to act.
- Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life. [stated in several ways, and variously attributed]
- The only person you are destined to become is the person you decide to be. [variously attributed]
- . . . by leadership we mean the art of getting someone else to do something that you want done because he wants to do it, not because your position of power can compel him to do it, or your position of authority. [Dwight D. Eisenhower]
“Motivation has been defined as an individual-level, unobservable state of striving, which drives and directs goal-pursuit behavior toward need fulfillment. Motivations, then, represent unmet needs which become salient to the organism, directing the organism to pursue need fulfillment, which is experienced both affectively and cognitively, and can be expressed behaviorally.” It is “the psychological construct ‘invented’ to describe the mechanism by which individuals and groups choose particular behaviour and persist with it . . .”
There are at least eleven types of motivation, which can be divided into three categories:
- Main types:
- Intrinsic motivation: “Intrinsic motivation is defined as the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence. When intrinsically motivated, a person is moved to act for the fun or challenge entailed rather than because of external products, pressures, or rewards.”;
- Extrinsic motivation: “Extrinsic motivation refers to the forms of regulation that underlie activities that are performed as a means to an end. Little Lisa who is now reading The Cat in the Hat because she wants the money is extrinsically motivated toward reading that book.”;
- Internal: “The pursuit of consequences that bear an intimate relation to the activities themselves (internal motives) . . .”:
- Competence and learning motivation: “In expectancy‐value theory, motivation is a function of the expectation of success and perceived value. Attribution theory focuses on the causal attributions learners create to explain the results of an activity, and classifies these in terms of their locus, stability and controllability. Social‐ cognitive theory emphasises self‐efficacy as the primary driver of motivated action, and also identifies cues that influence future self‐efficacy and support self‐regulated learning. Goal orientation theory suggests that learners tend to engage in tasks with concerns about mastering the content (mastery goal, arising from a ‘growth’ mindset regarding intelligence and learning) or about doing better than others or avoiding failure (performance goals, arising from a ‘fixed’ mindset). Finally, self‐determination theory proposes that optimal performance results from actions motivated by intrinsic interests or by extrinsic values that have become integrated and internalised.”;
- Attitude motivation is about how attitudes affect motivations;
- Achievement motivation is motivation directed toward achievement;
- Creativity motivation drives people toward creative activities: “. . . students’ creativity motivation can be influenced by a broad spectrum of affective experiences (i.e., positive and negative affect, stable and enduring moods, and momentary and mutable emotions). Encouraging students to accept and appreciate the diversity of affective experiences may be a first step for enhancing their creativity motivation.”;
- Physiological motivation stems from biological needs;
- External:
- Incentive motivation: “Under incentive interventions, individuals receive some tangible and desirable consequence (e.g., money or privilege) contingent on emitting some observable and verifiable behavior.”;
- Fear motivation: “. . . fear motives (are) positively associated with intrusive thoughts, and intrusive thoughts were negatively related to self-control strategies.”;
- Power motivation: “The power motive is the desire to have impact on other people, to affect their behavior or emotions.”;
- Affiliation and social motivation: “Social motivation can be described as a set of psychological dispositions and biological mechanisms biasing the individual to preferentially orient toward the social world (i.e., social orienting), to seek and take pleasure in social interactions (i.e., social reward), and to work to foster and maintain social bonds . . .”;
- Introjected motivation is grounded “in avoiding guilt and shame”:
- Identified motivation is present when someone identities a need to act but has not yet acted on it.
There are several theories of motivation, at least twenty of them. “Intrinsic theory suggests that individuals are motivated by internal factors like enjoyment and satisfaction, while extrinsic theory suggests that external factors like rewards and social pressure drive behavior. Arousal theory says that to feel motivated, people try to keep an optimal level of activation or excitement. Incentive theory suggests that behavior is driven by the promise of rewards or the threat of punishment.” These theories do not appear to be mutually exclusive. Pincus has developed a Unified Pyramid of Human Motivation.
Drive takes internal motivation into external action.
- Rational thoughts never drive people’s creativity the way emotions do. [attributed to Neil deGrasse Tyson]
- There’s a drive in me that won’t allow me to do certain things that are easy. [attributed to Johnny Depp]
“. . . drive concerns the extent to which a person acts on personal motivators . . .“ However, like motivation, drives (e.g., thirst and hunger) are internal processes.
“. . . drives (are) basic motivational neurobiological structures determining the organization of psychic life.” “Research in many species has provided increasingly detailed information on relevant, primarily subcortical brain systems supporting the expression of basic appetites and drives. While basic appetites and drives are essential for adaptation and survival in any environment, they are naturally constrained by an organism’s inherent biology and modulated as circumstances dictate.” “. . . central to motivation is nourishing our innate human need to be autonomous, competent, and to relate to our organizational culture.”
There are primary drives, which are biological; and secondary drives, which are learned or acquired. “Innate biological drives (such as thirst, hunger, and sex desire) are essential for survival, these are primary drives. In contrast, secondary drives are usually not necessary for survival, and are often linked to social or identity factors (e.g., the desire for wealth).” There is a sex drive, a hunger drive, and a thirst drive. At the secondary level are drives for belonging and for love; a drive to succeed, a drive toward self-esteem, a drive to self-actualize, and others. “Several lines of evidence support this view that love is not an emotion but motivation . . . Love also appears to be stronger than sex drive-those rejected by sexual overtures rarely kill themselves or others. Abandoned lovers sometimes stalk, commit suicide homicide, or fall into clinical depression.”
Real
True Narratives
Book narratives:
- Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (Simon & Schuster, 2018): a “rousing look at the political uses of this supposedly unfeminine emotion”.
- Jenny Boully, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life (Coffee House Press, 2018): “Boully addresses the impulse to write”.
- Ketanji Brown-Jackson, Lovely One: A Memoir (Random House, 2024), “is about motivation and mentors, swooshing through a résumé without apparent flaw. It’s a great glass elevator of uplift.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
Poetry
Out of a cell into this darkened space—
The end at twenty-five!
My tongue could not speak what stirred within me,
And the village thought me a fool.
Yet at the start there was a clear vision,
A high and urgent purpose in my soul
Which drove me on trying to memorize
The Encyclopedia Britannica!
[Edgar Lee Masters, “Frank Drummer”]
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
John Coltrane is an iconic figure in contemporary jazz. His hard-driving bop and post-bop jazz set a standard. “Coltrane remained musically driven till the end. As he said in 1966, months prior to his death, 'There is never any end… there are always new sounds to imagine, new feelings to get at. And always there is the need to keep purifying these feelings and sounds so that we can really see what we’ve discovered in its pure state. So that we can see more and more clearly what we are… we have to keep on cleaning the mirror.'” Books about Coltrane and his work are by Lewis Porter, ed., Lewis Porter, David N. Baker, Leonard Lewis Brown, Ben Ratliff, and Eric Nisenson. Here is a link to his releases, his playlists, a documentary film, an interview, some videos, a live set from 1960, and an audio recording called “The Making of A Love Supreme”. Substantial parts of his work have been compiled on “Coltrane ’58: The Prestige Recordings” (358’), “The Heavyweight Champion: The Complete Atlantic Recordings” (1995) (476’) and “The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings” (266’).
Woody Shaw was a jazz trumpeter who drove forward relentlessly in his playing. “Often described as the instrument's last great innovator, Shaw was a virtuoso who restructured the way trumpet players move between long intervals, and wrote his own harmonic and melodic language using notes outside the chords (a technique known as ‘side-slipping’).” Horace Silver said of him: “Woody Shaw is full of beautiful fire, drive, imagination, and harmonic knowledge.” He did not play at ultra-high volume or in high-pitch stratospheres as Maynard Ferguson did, but he never let up on the gas. Here links to his playlists, a live 1979 performance, and a live 1985 performance.
Saxophonist George Adams was a champion of hard-driving, straight-ahead jazz. Here is a link to George Adams – Don Pullen Quartet live at the Subway (1986) (53’). Here is a link to his playlists.
Albums:
- Peter Brötzmann, “PICA PICA” (42’) “is an all-star affair featuring the trio of Peter Brötzmann (reeds), Albert Mangelsdorff (trombone) and Gunter Sommer (drums), originally recorded in 1982 at Jazzfest Unna in Germany.”
- Noah Haidu, “Infinite Distances” (2017) (59’): “Drive and depth inform this meaty album by Noah Haidu, the assertive pianist and innovative composer leading its 11 sizzling tracks. Inspired by a conversation with Branford Marsalis about Rainer Maria Rilke, Haidu wrote 10 of these tunes, six of which form a suite based on the German poet’s provocative dictum: 'Among the closest people there remain infinite distances.'”
- Tom Harrell, “Infinity” (2019) (66’) “brims with uncomplicated structures, harmonic sophistication, nervy improvisations, and a mix of kaleidoscopic hard-bop and straight ahead post-bop influences.”
- Aaron Seeber, “First Move” (2022) (60’) is an album of hard-driving, straight-ahead jazz.
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Taylor Swift, "Shake It Off" (lyrics)
- Eminem, "Till I Collapse" (lyrics)
