Motivation is one of those tricky, intangible forces of the universe. If I push on a block of wood, that's a force that can be seen. But like gravity and centripetal force, motivation can't be seen. But it can be felt and measured.
Okay, so there is no standardized means of measuring motivation, but I'm certain you could make a personal scale if you wanted to. You know when the force of motivation is affecting you and you know when it's absolutely not part of the picture. The question is, can a body at rest perform work without the influence of motivation?
Did I just make the part of your brain that vaguely remembers high school physics freak out? Because I definitely have a little part of my brain spazzing out right now.
There's so much involved to go from body at rest, to applying motivational force, to making it happen -- whatever "it" is. Take for instance the garbage disposal.
Several months ago -- yes, months -- I convinced my garbage disposal to stop working when I stuck a lemon half down it and the disposal protested by stopping and not starting. I thought I'd burned out the motor. I thought I needed to go put in a work order with the apartment office idiots (oh, I have reason to think very little of my on-site staff, like when they said they were taking me to court for over a thousand dollars of unpaid rent and then it turned out they owed me $70). And then wait for lord knows how long for a repair man to show up for my not-very-urgent repair. And I, of course, would want to be home for this so that my cats would not dart off into the wide yonder when the repair guy came into the place if I wasn't here.
So I put it off. And put it off. There was no motivation to get it fixed. I had another sink I could use, so I did. I had a working dishwasher I could use, so I did. It wasn't convenient, but it was manageable, therefore cancelling out any force that might have become motivation to fix the situation.
And this is where "what I've learned from the TV show Dexter" comes into play. Srsly.
Then, during my marathoning of four seasons of Dexter, I watched the character Dexter "break" a garbage disposal, take it apart to look for evidence, and flip a switch to get it going again. And I was like, wtf? there's a switch down there? So I wondered over to my garbage disposal, looked underneath, and sure enough, there's a reset button down there. Ten seconds later: working garbage disposal.
I learned a lifeskill from watching Dexter -- how many people can say that?
