The internal dynamics and the shift of motivation might depend on the scale of the frame of reference. I was reading about the development of plastics recycling and the further development costs and I just saw humanity in my minds eye as an outsider, as if I’m looking at the whole humanity on earth from space. 

Shift of motivation happens when we shift frames of reference

The whole struggle to find some cheaper way to recycle materials or the effort to develop other materials seems pointless when you look at it at the bigger scale. Nothing the humanity does will affect things on the grander scheme of the universe. Of course there are many motivations to develop those technologies and many of them are one hundred percent legitimate sources but it feels somewhat pointless when you think about it. 

The lingering feeling behind this thought is that it feels like we have to keep grinding for more innovational ways to optimize our processes to please some driving force, like for Mother Earth and the environmental reasons. But we can just stop making plastics or stop the development of new technologies whenever we want. The whole race to further increase human potential and reach into the realm of science and technology, while understandable from the point of our desire to be timeless and kind of immortal by proxy, is nothing but a self imposed challenge. What im trying to convey is that no one or nothing is pushing us to spend time and effort on these problems, they are imposed on ourselves by ourselves.

To inspire motivation we need to change our perspective from universe to individuum.

So it seems like the source of motivation behind any human endeavor is not stemming from the view of the universe, or else we would all be nihilists. 

Meanwhile when you look closer and zoom in on individuals you can see a very high percentage of their motivation comes from interpersonal reasons. Trying to earn more power, trying to earn more money, trying to realize yourself and be somewhat immortal by the proxy of your works that will outlive you… The list can be elongated by many more reasons with the same profound, underlying interpersonal rivalry and the immortality mentality.

What can be deduced from this little observation is that in order to find motivation on a larger scheme of things you can tap onto the personal motivations on the much smaller scale. While being orders of magnitude smaller than the universal complexity, a sufficiently big organization can inspire the same feeling of unimportance in an individual worker as they feel in the whole universe.

To Summarize, the shift of motivation describes the smaller scale of human desires among the grandiose scheme of world.

So to motivate workers in a big organization you can introduce personal goals and motivations as inspiration. You can make them believe that they have a place in the working dynamics of their environment and have an impact on the behavior of the organization. In the end you are essentially introducing them to a smaller scale applied on a bigger space.   

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• Thumbnail Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash
• In-Post Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash