Motivations

This post is going to be short and to the point, but it’s something that’s been on my mind.

There are many things that we do without thinking about the real reasons why. We lose sight of things that we learn when we are young and fall into cultural fallacies that have become the norm.

For example, simple everyday things. What’s the main reason why we brush our teeth? Shower? etc. etc.

If everyone suddenly lost the sense of smell, how much less likely would people be to
brush their teeth? It’s not just an issue of cleaning our mouths, but rather a way to prevent the social issues that come with having bad breathe. A lot of people only brush once a day. It is better (at least from what my dentist tells me) to brush and floss at night; that way, all the guck in your mouth doesn’t sit and rot in your mouth all night while you sleep. Plenty of people brush only in the morning. But who is going to brush only at night? Nobody.

Here’s a better example: The idea behind not speeding when driving is because it’s safer. Most people don’t speed because they don’t want a ticket. How backwards is that?


Usually, it’s not too hard to figure out what the ‘right’ thing to do is. That’s not, much of the time, that hard to figure out. The hard thing is the motivation as to why one does (or does not) do the right thing.

There’s a huge difference between doing the right thing only because it’s the right thing to do and doing the right thing because you want to do the right thing. The second is much more active, and while it’s a subtle difference, there’s a huge gap on the two sides of that fine line.