I woke up at 2 o'clock in the morning. Outside the open window, I heard birds chirping. I pushed open the courtyard door and stood at the entrance. The air felt cool against my skin, like flowing water. The round moon in the sky shone its clear light on the earth through a few wisps of thin clouds, like goose feathers. A star in the southeast sky was particularly bright.
At this moment, some questions that I have thought about many times resurfaced in my mind. For example, why do you engage in creative work or research? Why do you want to achieve something? What is the motivation behind it? Do you enjoy the process of doing those things or the results they bring? Are you doing those things for personal gain and fame? Besides fame and fortune, are there any other motivations? Do you truly enjoy doing those things in themselves?
Here are some answers to the questions I pondered:
Motivations for doing something are as follows:
- No motivation, simply because you enjoy it
- To gain benefits
- To gain fame
- To change the world and make it operate according to your will (this is actually a desire for power)
- To receive or give love and recognition
- To fulfill other desires
I thought of a method to determine whether you truly enjoy doing something. Consider an extreme scenario, for example, imagine being placed on a planet where you are the only person, with no worries about food and clothing, but there are no other humans or descendants to inherit what you have done. In this situation, would you still enjoy doing that thing? This scenario eliminates motivations such as fame, power, love, and recognition. If the answer is yes, then you truly enjoy doing that thing (the process of it).
Doing something because of the consequences it brings is not truly enjoying doing that thing. Only enjoying the process of doing something without any motivation is true enjoyment.
Only when you truly enjoy something can you do it well. If you only focus on the results and cannot enjoy the process, even if you can achieve success, it will be accompanied by pain. The ideal situation is to both enjoy the process and bring about good results.