You have forgotten the key to yourself || Acharya Prashant, with youth (2014)

Question: Sir, good afternoon. While I speak before you, I will try to choose my words very gracefully. Sir, I have many things in my life that keep me happy but it is life and we are not supposed to have everything. I have lacked something in my life that I can say as self motivation. How do I get self motivated?

Speaker: What you are really asking for is not motivation. So first of all let us make a little bit of semantic correction.

Do you know what is motive? A motive implies a desire. A motive implies a target. All motives are outside of you and hence all motives are a kind of greed. To be motivated means to have a desire to attain something outside of you. That is my motive. That is my target. That is what I want. That is what I want to attain. That is my motive. You have talked of two kinds of motivations. Let me look at both of them.

One is external motivation which you kind of don’t like and then there is self-motivation that you are asking for. What is this external motivation? You see external motivation is when somebody comes to you, speaks to you, fills your mind with his thoughts, gives a goal to you and you feel like going towards that goal. But you forget that those thoughts and that goal has been given to you by somebody else. The thoughts appear powerful now, the goal appears tempting now but the power and temptation will stay only as long as that person is there. When the motivator goes away, the motivation also goes away. You would have seen that happen. Somebody comes and fills you up with energy and you feel this is it. ‘Yes! Now I can move mountains, but the next day, back to your slovenly self. Because it was very external; it was just a borrowed thing that was coming from outside and hence went back. It was not yours at all. This is the first kind of motivation.