Driven

My weight training coach, who is a gem of a human being, posts thought provoking items which cause me to go into wild gyrations of introspection for hours at a time.  Today his question was:  "What drives you?"

Not motivates.  He hates that word - and I kind of get that.  Motivations are often based on things going right or external factors - I am motivated to do well to make money but if lose ability to make the money, I more than likely will lose the motivation; I motivated to eat well and exercise to lose weight but if I stop losing weight and even perhaps gaining it, I lose the motivation.

Drive is different.  Drive is something that you have to accomplish.  Drive is asking yourself the questions "What am I willing to do to accomplish this?"  and 'What am I willing to give up to accomplish this?" Drive is the thing you continue to do when all motivations have passed into the dust and there is nothing but desert ahead of you.

Somewhat interestingly, nature provides us with an actual application:  the reproductive (or sex) drive.  Look at how focused males getting in the rutting season or when females are in heat, observe the journey salmon make back to their spawning grounds (the ultimate drive of course, as they all die).  At that moment, animals will do anything - anything - to satisfy that drive.

Which is what my coach is talking about.

Which led me to a second question:  What drives me?

That question was a lot harder to answer than I had anticipated - in fact, after reading it this morning I still have not come up with a definitive answer.    Because I have a lot of things which, if I am honest, I am motivated to do.  I seem to have nothing (at least off the top of my head) that I am driven to do.

That is not to say I do not have something, or somethings, that drive me.  That is to say that I lack clarity on what they are.  I suppose the super easy way to resolve the question is to simply stop doing everything - and then see what you start doing right after that (although in my case, I do not know that this would be effective as I would probably do as many things out of the obligation or sunk costs as I would out of drive).

But it is there, somewhere, under layers and layers of years and years and accretions of "have to's" and "want to's".  Somewhere, buried deep, is the "need to".

I just have to find it.