Motivation

As I grew up, I remember something me and some of my peers used to say, that “arithmetic has its own people,” the implication of which is probably already clear: I was a failure in the subject; and a terrible one at that. I used to fail math, right from elementary school to high school. I do not remember ever hitting the pass mark, except maybe once or twice, when I cheated successfully without getting caught. I failed so terribly that I became used to it and everything that came with it, including the scorn and ridicule I received from my math teacher and my own father. But all this ‘calm,’ don’t-care attitude came because of one thing: I was not alone. I had many friends whose performance was poorer than mine, but since we all never hit the pass mark, we never really saw the difference in whose poor performance was ‘better.’ I never really gave much thought to the seriousness of my failure until, one day in our second year in high school, a girl who was my sworn enemy told me to my face, “You will NEVER pass math in your life,” after a disagreement. Not even the negativity I received from my father had hurt me the way I was hurt that day. And thankfully, that was my turning point.

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This girl’s words motivated me to study math as I had never done my entire life. I had to prove her wrong. When I reminisced on her words later that night, I had an epiphany! I mean, we had the same teachers, teaching us the same syllabus, in the same class, at the same time; but why was I failing while everybody else was passing? That night I made the resolution to start studying math. I decided that I could do well, just like anybody else. I only needed to change how I approached the subject and stop listening to other people’s stereotyped negativities, like “math has its own people.” To cut the story short, at the end of that term, I beat more than half the class in math. It was unbelievable! It took me years to realize that all I needed to do to start doing well was to change my attitude.

When I scored my first 60% in math, I became motivated beyond measure. Scoring that much left me more self-driven than that girl’s remarks did. My motivation was enhanced for various reasons. To begin with, I felt a great deal of self-satisfaction. I had never known doing well in something after failing on it for so long felt so good. It was a feeling I was never letting go of any time soon. But other things also motivated me even further. The recognition I received in school was unimagined until then. I was congratulated on the parade and rewarded with a scientific calculator. I was mentioned as an example of positive change and hard work. When I went home, I found that my teacher had already called my dad and told him of my achievement, and he was all smiles when I arrived. That smile was all the acknowledgment I needed from him then. That 60% marked the beginning of my good performance overall until I finished high school. 

I must mention, at this point, that motivation requires maintenance. Motivation can sometimes decrease for several reasons, the first of which is a failure, again. Failure, especially in something in which one had previously succeeded, can really demoralize the heart (Berridge, 2018).I can relate this to a time I backslid in math and found myself at the bottom of the class. Were it not for the additional motivation from my teacher, I may never have picked up the pace again. There is an attempt to explain this phenomenon by the “Process Theory,” a set of concepts explaining how something changes and develops (Gopalan et al., 2017, October).In this theory’s dialectic archetype, change and stability are defined in relation to the balance of power between two opposing sides, in this case, my friends and me. With regard to motivation, Gopalan et al.say that process theories can be categorized into two distinct perspectives: process and content theories. The latter deals with the source of people’s motivation and their individual goals and needs. It is this variable that my teacher seems to have exploited when he told me to focus on myself and my future rather than how my friends felt toward me because I was now performing better than them in a subject we used to fail together. As it is, Gopalan et al.relate that the process theories are mostly used by, among others, educators.

Another thing I realized is that success can cause one to lose friends, and if these friends were very close, one could become demotivated. When I received praise and reward on parade for my excellent performance, virtually all my clique that subscribed to the math stereotype mentioned earlier left me. They thought that I belonged to a different ‘class’ of people now. And believe me, life in school without them became boring. They also somewhat stigmatized me. I know this might sound stupid, but I almost gave up studying hard to rejoin them. But I thought the better of it. I assessed my situation and saw that the experience of failing because of stigma would be worse than the experience I had before I started doing well, so I decided to accept their apparent separation and move on. Fortunately, eventually, most of them were motivated by my performance that they also decided to change their attitudes toward math. But I also learned a very important lesson: it is more difficult to get a person to change their attitude over something than to teach them a new technical concept.

In addition to how I counteracted the stigma described above, there are other reasons why I worked hard after my epiphany. After I lost many of my closest friends because I was doing well, I realized that everyone has their individual life to live. One might rely on friends and other associates for a lot of things, but at the end of the day, all one has to look up to is oneself. Most of the time, we share with other people are temporary; high school, college, workplaces, and many more, which is why one should never allow social stigma to retard their development of stunt their motivation. Also, that experience in high school (and others that I have had in my adult endeavors) taught me that “hard work pays” is not just a wise saying; it is a reality. It pays in all aspects of life like it paid off when I started working hard in all other subjects, not just math alone. 

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In every sense, I think my experience with motivation is an exact fit with the postulates of the Need Theory, otherwise known as the “Three Needs Theory.” This motivational model was proposed by psychologist David McClelland in an attempt to explain how the actions of people (in this case, from a managerial context) are affected by the need for affiliation, power, and achievement (Mungi, 2020). McClelland’s theory seems to be an extension of the earlier proposed Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and claims that everybody has the three types of motivations mentioned above regardless of their culture, race, sex, or age. I can certainly relate to this because looking closely, I can say that my initial motivation to study hard was evoked by the need for power when that girl challenged me. Mungiclaims that people in this “need-for-power” category enjoy work and revere discipline highly. 

Although these may not exactly echo my feelings at the moment back in high school, I can say that this same doctrine has shaped much of what I have achieved in later life. Mungibelieves that people motivated by this need enjoy influencing others (as I did most of my friends), competition, winning arguments (as I sought to win the challenge thrown to me by that girl), and status recognition (otherwise, how would I explain how I felt when I received heaps of praise on parade?). As I have learned in my life as an adult, this type of motivation comes with a personal desire for prestige, and a never-ending need to improve one’s personal status (Mungi, 2020).

References

Berridge, K. C. (2018). Evolving concepts of emotion and motivation. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1647.

Gopalan, V., Bakar, J. A. A., Zulkifli, A. N., Alwi, A., & Mat, R. C. (2017, October). A review of the motivation theories in learning. In AIP Conference Proceedings (Vol. 1891, No. 1, p. 020043). AIP Publishing LLC.

Mungi, A. (2020). McClelland’s Theory of Motivation.