Hi, my name is Vivas Kumar. I’m a principal at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence and an MBA student at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business.

When I think of the concept of motivation, I think it starts from having a vision of who you want to be or where you would like your organization to be in the future. And if you can imagine that vision every single day when you wake up and think about the steps that you need to get there, that right there is the source of motivation.

For me, my vision has been in building myself up to be a leader of an organization. For many years, every day, I would imagine what would it take for me to be the leader in this organization. And I found that by doing my job better every single day, I would one day rise to that occasion, and that motivated me to be a better version of myself at work, at home, every single day.

Once you become a leader, your whole job is to motivate and influence the people around you. And at that point, your job is to design the right incentives to motivate the people who work for you and work with you on a daily basis. Designing incentives also takes having a clear and compelling vision of the future. And once you’ve got that vision designed, then you can succeed in motivating anybody to achieve anything.

Thank you Vivas, those were some excellent points. It’s very important for us to hold that future image of ourselves in our head so that we may know what we are working towards. Our behaviors in the present lead to that future self, so it is our behaviors that are representative of our motivations. These behaviors are influenced by our environment, internal factors, and sociocultural aspects of our lives that makes us who we are and what we want to do.

These future images can be defined by goals we set for ourselves which are an important part to the process, whether they are long-term or short-term goals. With our goals, it’s important to make a plan to reach them. There is a saying that goes “a goal without a plan is just a dream.” Breaking things down to this fundamental level can help anyone in the process of achieving what they have set their hearts on, and it is this process that allows anyone to find the motivation to accomplish anything.