This week I’m doing something completely different. I wrote an essay about motivation, about my father, and about my personal development. No news articles, no references just one 31 year old’s perspective on his life and what motivates him.
Me (12) and Dad running the White Rock Half
There’s a point during my morning runs, about mile three or so, where I turn off the podcast or music and lock in. The effort to get my lazy ass moving before the sun comes up fades away. What’s left is a sense of calm, breath and the plodding of my On sneakers on the dirt. Lately, my dad has entered my mind a lot…also my wife’s voice teasing me that I’m turning into him more and more each day. He died a little over three years ago and in the strangest way, I feel closer to him than I ever have before.
He was an Ironman with an oft thick skull. He was someone I looked up to. He was someone I argued relentlessly with. Like two rams bashing their horns into one another. He was an invulnerable father to vulnerable children. There was so much love. He was so many things in his too-short life, but the one I want to talk about here is what was actually driving him, because for most of my life I was absolutely, one hundred percent, 180 degrees wrong, upside-down wrong.
For most of my career as a freelance video guy I ran on the same fuel everyone else does. I wanted to be successful. Get the next job. Build something. Have the work mean something to someone.
Be great.
That kept me moving for stretches and then it didn’t, and then I would start it again. There’s a pattern almost every freelancer I know runs through. The job comes in, you stop doing the work that brought it in. The job ends, you’re back at the bottom looking up. You start the work again. Another job comes. Repeat. Most people feel on top of the world helming a shoot, when it’s over a sense of dread and futility consumes them. The only way to persevere is through willpower, integrity and determination to be great. Or so I thought anyway…
I assumed in my twenties that a desire for success was the motivation. It wasn’t. It doesn’t tell you why to get up tomorrow when nothing is asking you to. Most freelancers I know are driving themselves through sheer will for success and making good work. But being motivated by success makes even the wins feel not so satisfying because you just have to keep running on that fuel regardless of the outcome.
As my friends and family who are subscribed already know, my father was a craniofacial surgeon. He was on the team that did the first successful separation of conjoined twins joined at the head. He spent his career fixing facial deformities and injuries on patients from all over the world. He gave people their smiles back, and he built smiles that had never existed in the first place. He worked with charities. Performed surgeries for free. At the end of his life he was developing drugs to cure cancer.
I always thought he was driven by success. He was. Definitionally. He achieved an enormous amount of it. But I was looking at the output and calling it the engine, and now that he’s gone I can see what was actually under it. There was another motivation, and it was bigger than the success was. He wanted to help people. Friends, relatives of friends, strangers, family at any moment of the day, anyone in front of him. He never stopped. The success was downstream of that.
Through Ironman triathlons, hiking, biking and in the gym he pushed his body to the limits. Harder than anyone I know - ruining his back while doing it. But even still, people around him had this strange feeling that he wasn’t going to die, that he’d outwork mortality. I thought it all was his inherent willpower, clearly I lacked and could never compete because I never felt I had that extra gear of will that seemed innate to him.
But now I have a different opinion…I think now he ran his body that hard so he could help people for as long as possible. The exercise wasn’t vanity or simple achievement. It was logistics. More years on his feet meant more people he could help. Fortifying himself to help and help his loved ones and everyone else so they could be strong like him when he wasn’t here anymore. Ironically, his mythic endeavors lend themselves to further mythologizing in his absence. At least by myself anyway.
I’ve recently caught the running bug myself. Having tried time and time again, exercising on and off, but I always ran out of willpower to make it habitual. But after a while now, except for the first few lazy miles, it doesn’t feel fueled by my willpower at all. The motivation, I couldn’t quantify at first, was coming from somewhere else. A source less effable.
It’s been over three years since he died, which feels tremendously far away and like yesterday at the same time. Our second kid is coming any day. And suddenly, I realized I’m not running on willpower anymore. There are people I’m responsible to. My family first. The freelancers I’ve started working with through Creative Radar. Anyone CR ends up serving long-term. Every morning has stakes that aren’t about me, and that changes the work. It actually changes the work.
And in the weirdest way it feels like less pressure, less weight, and an easier load than a solitary quest for success in the name of success and greatness. I, like my father before me, simply want to help people. I enjoy doing it. It energizes and focuses me.
Here’s the part I want to be precise about. My motivation now is to help people. Not because I’m a good person. And it doesn’t mean I need to stop working in my field, in my industry and go save the environment or solve world hunger. Even typing “my motivation now is to help people,” makes me feel some kind of self-glorifying a-hole. But the reality is, I just figured out what the real engine was, and it’s so incredibly useful. Making videos for brands didn’t do this for me - it was always exhausting, but I love the rush of production. I love directing.
Helping a freelancer get clear on what they’re actually selling, watching someone hold their work steady when it’s been wobbling for years—that does. Discovering, reinforcing or accelerating others’ motivations. For me, that’s a properly motivated process.
If I’d known this in my twenties I could have pivoted earlier or found a cause-based video niche perhaps that felt like my daily life was helping people. Importantly, from a business perspective, I could have found more of the success—the actual thing—by stopping chasing it.
Wanting success isn’t a motivation. It’s what someone with a real motivation gets.
This is the part for you. It doesn’t have to be family. It doesn’t have to be helping people. It has to be something outside of yourself that pulls. If you don’t have it, you’re running on willpower, and willpower slone won’t hold up against the third lull, the fifth dry month, the next shift in the market. No system, no routine, no productivity stack will compensate for a missing engine. Find the thing that’s bigger than wanting to win. Then go do the work.
The only tricky part is that it’s not like an actor asking a director “What’s my motivation?” and the director has an answer. Finding it inside yourself is no easy task. But part of the work I am doing with Creative Radar will be to build a system of mirrors to reflect your motivation in a way that feels tangible, repeatable and fulfilling.
Anyway, thanks for reading my story. Please respond to this email if you enjoyed this type of issue, I’m still figuring out the form of this newsletter. How personal to be, how informational, but at the end of the day I’d like it to be something that you all are connecting to.
Love you, Dad.
— Matthew