Someone asked me to answer this at work...
It is a question that I never managed to answer. I did not even remotely come close to answering it.
The answer I blurted out was "Peace of mind".
But I have no clue what that most cliched phrase even means!!!
As an average executive, I guess I see my life as largely being classified only into 2 components - professional and personal.
Looking at professional aspect, I sometimes wonder what is that motivates people at work-place. Is it money; (I can almost here the reply as "No"), Is it growth; Is it "professional satisfaction"? Is it a sense of workplace competition?
Strangely the only two things that come to my mind are:
- George Mallory was a celebrated British Mountaineer who disappeared in his attempt to surmount Mt. Everest in 1924. His body was found 75 years later. One of the famous incidents attributed to him was his reply to the question - "Why do you want to climb Mt. Everest?"...."Because it is there".
- In Call of the Wild (Jack London), the author depicts a bunch of alaskan sledge dogs. These sledge dogs were used to transport men and material across vast expanses of snow and ice. The author narrates a strange phenomenon. The journeys that these dogs would undertake were extremely arduous, and many a dog would not last the entire distance. However if any extremely weakened dog was removed from the sledge and left to run along (which is definitely better than pulling a back-breaking load), the dog would soon die because of its loss of belongingness to the pack. This basically meant that if the dogs were stopped from doing the work that would definitely kill them, they would die faster!!
Now coming back to workplace motivation - can it be that the biggest reason for working hard is that the work "
is there"
p.s: This is what Lee Kuan Yew said a few months back - '
We've got to educate those about to retire: Don't retire, work. Retirement means death'
While I'm wasting my time wondering, can I also wonder whether it is more of the fear of the unknown - what is there beyond work?; that keeps people at work?
