Having an Uncommon Home, Education, and Personal Life – Part 7

Educated Within or Without?

Motivation is a powerful tool.  Sadly it can be used in our favor or against us.

When you’re a writer many times you get to make things up.  Like this phrase “exterior motivation”.  Since I get to make it up, I also get to define it.  For me, this phrase means being motivated by an opinion of oneself that comes from external influences-what others think of you. The opposite of this, of course, is interior motivation which is the ability to be motivated from within oneself-not having a need to be motivated by others.

“Common” (the person) does what it does to impress someone other than yourself
“Common, ordinary, average” is the person who uses their skills, talents, work and possessions to motivate themselves to achieve more.  Let me give you a better example.  Being able to tell someone you own a Corvette brings you exterior motivation to own other things.  Here’s a better example, normal people tend to use prestige, advancement, and employment to motivate them into furthering their education.  Had it not been for their desire for an impressive resume’, they’d never attempted to get that degree.   Exterior motivation is doing something you would have never done just to impress someone other than yourself.  That’s common if I do say so myself.

Let me ask, did you pursue a higher education so that it would help define who you are?

“Uncommon” (the person) does what it does to impress yourself rather than someone else
Interior motivation starts by having self-worth and self-approval.  What I mean by that is, you don’t need someone else’s approval to validate you or your self-worth.  What did your education, degree, provide you in the first place?  Was it so that you could say you had it or was it because you wanted it for you?  What if education was based on the concept of interior motivation?  It would mean that you’d become what you were meant to become not what someone else wanted you to become.  Maybe you would have bypassed getting the degree altogether and created that one business that no one else is doing today.  Maybe you’d study subjects that meant something to you and not the ones that would potentially offer you big bucks at the end of it.  Interior motivation, when it comes to how we are educated, transforms us from being ordinary into something much more.

How you use the education received is your choice; you can use it to assist in acquiring the interior things such as knowledge and wisdom at the expense of leaving common behind. Or, you can use it to develop the exterior things that impress others.  The choice is yours.  Think about it for a second, which is better receiving the accolades or being the one who is able to give them?
Don’t misunderstand, education is a great tool to have! My point in this message is to expose how we can think differently about the education we have or are in the process of getting, in an effort to benefit myself and others in an uncommon way.  Use what’s in you to make what’s around you better.