Your response: How do you define the word 'motive'? How do you define the word 'motivate'?
My definitions for each term:
Motive: the reason behind taking an action.
Motivate: to encourage someone to do something.
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Eckhart Aurelius Hughes wrote: ↑February 13th, 2024, 2:21 pm If you haven't already, you can sign up to be personally mentored by Scott "Eckhart Aurelius" Hughes at this link.I am going to share my 1st year in college experience. I didn't really have a mentor like Mr. Scott by then, but I found away to get through it.
Cryptic Spy wrote: ↑February 3rd, 2024, 12:58 am I'm currently in my college, 1st year...Hi, Cryptic Spy,
How do I manage everything around me?
Thank you for your question. However, it is very vague, so I am not sure I understand your meaning fully.
Nonetheless, my primary suggestion to you is to first carefully and slowly read my book, In It Together: The Beautiful Struggle Uniting Us All, twice.
The reason for reading it at least twice is explained here.
Then, my next piece of advice for you is to do your absolute best to strictly follow all eleven of the numbered suggestions at the end of the book.
If you do that, you will surely have invincible free-spirited inner peace (a.k.a. inspired consistent true happiness), which in turn will come along with having incredible grace and gracefulness, meaning you will be able to play and juggle whatever cards and punches life is throwing your way with happy grace and infinite ease.
You will then be approaching life and its exciting endless challenges in the way the best martial arts master in the entire world would approach a martial arts fight. You will respond to it with a happy calm confidence competence that is so empoweringly and enricheningly graceful that it seems supernatural.
In other words, my book (In It Together) will teach you how to feel neither overwhelmed nor underwhelmed but perfectly whelmed, a powerful state better known as inner peace, grace, or gracefulness that comes with instant invincible free-spirited happiness and also leads to seemingly supernatural levels of external success and achievements, such as making huge amounts of money or achieving ridiculous results in the gym, or whatever your unique external goals happen to be.
Beyond that, you may also find my answers to the following previous Q&As relevant and/or helpful:
- How are you able to balance your work and do it so efficiently? How do balance your time so well to accomplish all you do?
- How did you handle it when you were a full-time single parent of two young kids?
- How did you manage to sleep between jobs and taking care of your children when they were young?
- I need some ideas on what to do when you are parenting alone between work and caring for the young children.
- How do I combine my school activities with work?
- How did you manage to get all parts of your life in order while en route to success? It seems like you had everything all planned out.
- How can I balance two competing priorities (e.g. fitness goals vs having fun and not being bored)? (includes notes on prioritization with helpful analogy of rocks/pebbles/sand)
- How does it feel to run many websites? (includes notes on compartmentalizing and monotasking)
- Can one multitask occupation? For instance, can one be a doctor, engineer and an artist at the same time?
- I am just awestruck. You are a founder, a coder, and a dad on top of that. How do manage it all?
Some common themes you will see in my answers to the above questions are as follows:
1. Determine your actual real priorities. Namely, this answer provides a helpful analogy of thinking of different level priorities as different sized rocks.
2. Compartmentalizing
3. Monotasking
4. Do less, better. (That is the title of a chapter from my book.)
Here are a couple especially relevant excerpts from the answers I have linked above:
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes wrote: ↑January 31st, 2024, 4:41 pm My system for maintaining inner peace and achieving huge external success with incredible grace, confidence, and happy ease is built on honestly determining what one's own priorities are, in order, and then making absolutely certain to take care of #1 before taking care of #2 and to do #2 before #3 and so on. I look at the big priorities and top goals like big rocks, and look at the the lower priorities as sand, and look at it is if I am looking to fill a finite sack. I put the big rocks in first, then once I am sure I have got those in there, I pour in as much sand as I can.
If you put the sand in first, then you won't have room for the rocks.
[...]
Even if in reality you won't have to choose between the two in the most extreme black-and-white binary way, such that you can have all of one and still some of the other, it's typically very helpful to start by hypothetically imagining you only had the binary option of all of first and none of the second vs none of the first and all of the second. And that's just so you can understand what you real #1 priority is, meaning what your biggest rock is and thus also which is just some of of the infinite sand and pebbles in comparison. It's just some of the infinite of pile of available extra icing some of which you might throw on top if you have some time left.
[...]
The seeming conflicts (e.g. maintaining sobriety while maintaining friendships, losing weight while still eating tasty snacks and not feeling hunger, etc.) tend to evaporate once one takes the time to do the self-exploration and meditation to honestly know oneself. The false appearance of conflict arises from trying to fit an impossible amount of rocks and sand in a bag, and then one in that situation might ask me how they can fit even more rocks and sand in their bag. My answer is you cannot. It is impossible. Instead, I suggest you start emptying your cup. A cup is useful because of it's emptiness. Conceptually take everything out of your finite bag; in your mind, dump out all the rocks and sand. Then, slowly, with extreme self-honesty, one at a time pick your priorities and put them in the empty bag one a time. You'll get your big rocks, then you can throw some sand in, and other people will be asking you, "Wow, how did you fit so much in your bag? It must be the heaviest most filled bag I've ever seen! How do you get so much done? How do you achieve such incredible success in everything you put your mind to?" Do what I've told you in this post, and they will be asking you that.
***
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes wrote: ↑January 11th, 2024, 5:36 pm
With monotasking and compartmentalizing, you take the pros of putting all your focus and energy into one thing without the con of putting all your eggs into one basket. Likewise, you get the pros of having a diversified portfolio of investments, skills, and incredible accomplishments without the con of anxiously and counter-productively being spread too thin and juggling so much at once that you drop everything.
Not only do monotasking and compartmentalizing make you much more productive and lead to incredible external success, but also (by no coincidence) they are much more conducive to having an amazing sense of inner peace and a calm, quiet, powerful, resilient, self-determined, peaceful, spacious state of mind.
There's a wild hilarious irony to the correlation between willful anxiety (namely that which comes from one attempting to juggle so much at once) and the utter lack of productivity that comes with that anxiety. I suspect many people choose that miserable counter-productive anxiety because they foolishly imagine it as being the price of productivity when the exact opposite is the case. The price of productivity is letting go of the anxiety and letting go of the addiction to restless overdoing, an addiction that comes in large part from mistaking effort for productivity.
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
monotasking.jpg
---
In addition to having authored his book, In It Together, Eckhart Aurelius Hughes (a.k.a. Scott) runs a mentoring program, with a free option, that guarantees success. Success is guaranteed for anyone who follows the program.
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes wrote: ↑October 11th, 2023, 12:22 amHi Scott.Thera reads wrote: ↑October 10th, 2023, 10:27 pm I want to have a wider view on philosophy. After watching the Truman Show, I'm beginning to wonder if anything is real. What do you think?Hi, Thera reads,
Great question!
I love The Truman Show. I'm also fan of some of these other movies that have a similar way of exploring the concept of reality itself:
- The Matrix
- Vanilla Sky
- Fight Club
- Jacob's Ladder
- Free Guy
However, we don't have to rely on fiction or the age-old question about whether you might be dreaming right now as you read this. Modern science has shown that waking life is at best almost entirely just as much a hallucination as a conventional dream. Your brain is like a PlayStation or Xbox creating this VR world, the same as it does when you are having a sleeping dream, but at best your brain is really just in a dark quiet skull with no light or sound. Here is a post I wrote about that subject that I think you might like:
Commentary on self-transcendence, ego death, and dying before you die; with a finger snap more brutal than Thanos
There's definitely a lot of things that we typically treat as real due to misleading intuitions and/or for practical purposes that definitely aren't real.
But we can start to get a grasp for what definitely is real by playing with the idea of this life and this world being an actual dream. Let's assume you are dreaming right now. Or make it not pretend by literally reminding yourself to literally ask yourself this question next time you are sleeping at night having an actual literal conventional dream. You can talk about it with the other characters in the dream world. Maybe literally have a debate with yourself in your dream tonight.
There's an undeniable reality to your consciousness itself, meaning you yourself, meaning your true self, the real you. From that, there's other equally undeniable realities. What you feel is one. A hallucination or dream or even the story in a fictional book doesn't need to be real for the way it makes you feel to be real. Your experience of it is real. A nightmare is really scary regardless of its reality. Fiction has a way of becoming real when it is experienced (and/or created) by consciousness.
In my book, In It Together, I write that even a dream is real if it is consciosuly dreamt.
What you see may be a hallucination, but that you see it is not.
Your true intentions and the choices you make are real, no matter what.
Just because you are playing virtual poker instead of with real cards, your choice to play those cards--real or not--the way you do is real. Your choice to unconditionally accept the cards you are dealt versus hate and resent what you cannot control is real. The cards your dealt don't need to be real for your choice of how to play them to be real. The cards your dealt don't need to be real for this to be real: your choice to lovingly accept them versus choosing to engage in miserable impotent resentment or hate of them.
The hate you choose to have in your heart, if any, is real.
Or, if instead, you choose to practice love and acceptance, that is real. The love is real. The choice is real.
That is, in part, what I mean in the book when I write, "Not even a god can come between you and your choices."
Your choices and intentions are real, even if what allegedly actually happens as a result of those intentions and choices cannot be known or is not even real.
If I choose to hatefully point a gun at an innocent little baby and fire, not realizing I am dreaming, and then wake up before the bullet strikes, my choice to murder that baby was still real. That hateful or otherwise murderous intent was still real, even if the baby and the gun was not. In a sense, I am still really a hateful murderer even if I wake up after committing the murder to find I was dreaming without realizing it.
That's why I don't commit murder and why I don't engage in miserable resentment or hate, neither in my dreams at night nor in this waking life we often falsely treat as so much realer than our dreams even though it clearly is not.
For some things, the ends don't and can't justify the means because the means are undeniably real and the alleged ends are not.
It's not just the choice or intent to commit hateful miserable murder. The same goes for things the like the choice to be honest and brave versus being a coward and lying thieving cheater. These choices are undeniable real, even if one is dreaming while one makes them, or unknowing living the The Matrix or The Truman Show.
The hate or love you have is real. Your choice to do your best to put that love--or hate--into practice is undeniably real.
That is in large part why I say that to have hate in your heart is to be in hell. One like that will be miserable hateful while dreaming and miserably hateful while awake. They will be miserable hateful while in the north and miserable hateful in the south. The miserable hate they have is real, and so no dreamy forms or possibly fictional worlds can cover it up or give them an escape. It's all just a different mask on the same real thing.
In contrast, to have unconditional love in your heart for everyone and everything is to be in heaven. The masks and covers change, but the reality beneath does not.
I am in heaven before I fall asleep at night, I am in heaven while in my sleeping dreams, and then still I am in heaven when I awake in the morning to this waking life we falsely think of as so much realer than our dream worlds at night.
For better or worse, we can't escape our own hearts, by which I really mean our own spirits and choices. What's in there is real, and it stays wirh us with through all these dreamy dancing forms in these quickly changing worlds, like an unconcealable scar on the face of an actor playing different roles in different moves. It's a glimpse of the real sneaking into the fiction. It's a peak at the naked constant underneath the ever-changing clothes.
What my book calls the real you is real.
In a way, the clothes never are.
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
seneca-quote.png
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes wrote: ↑July 10th, 2023, 2:17 pmThat part of your neighbour's wife is funny .Wenesha K wrote: ↑July 6th, 2023, 6:49 pm Hi Scott,Hi, Wenesha K,
I hope this post finds you well.
So tell me, what motivates you daily?
Thank you for your questions!
Different people tend to mean different things by the word motivate, and, by extension, the word motive.
Word for word, two people might both seem to ask the same exact question, such as "What was the murderer's motive?"
Or, they might ask, "What motivated the murderer?" Or, "What motivated the alcoholic to drink?" Or, "What motivated the adulterer to have the affair?"
Of all those people together, one might collectively ask, What were their shared motives?
However, despite two speakers' words being the same, the meaning might be very different between two different speakers who ask those questions.
To really answer your question accurately, let me first ask you, how do you define the word 'motivate'? In other words, what do you mean by the word 'motivate' when you use it?
In any case, let me say that I hold my inner peace (a.k.a. consistent true happiness) as very valuable to me and as an absolute top priority. As such, I tend to do my best to avoid what most people would call 'motivation'. Because I value my inner peace (a.k.a. happiness) so deeply, I work hard to be un-motivated and to have relatively little desire, for a human, that is.
Many philosophies and religious traditions have taught that desire is the root of all suffering.
In my book, I state a similar but slightly different premise: I say desire is suffering. In the lingo of my book, they are two words for the same thing.
More roughly speaking, one could say I do my best to desire what I have and only what I have. But, of course, the more common word for that is gratitude rather than desire.
For example, I do my best to not covet my neighbour's wife; that is, of course, assuming she isn't already in my bed.
An elaboration on how such intentional de-motivation can play out more practically is in the chapter of my book titled, "Do Less, Better".
Wenesha K wrote: ↑July 6th, 2023, 6:49 pm And what philosophy inspires you the most that helped you a lot in your daily life?I have been very inspired by the following philosophers, thinkers, and spiritual teachers:
- Albert Camus
- Eckhart Tolle
- Alan Watts
- Marcus Aurelius (and Stoicism in general)
- Lao Tzu (author of the Tao Te Ching)
- Buddha (i.e. Siddhartha Gautama)
- Jesus
- Ram Dass
- Albert Einstein
In more practical and human matters, a couple of my personal role models are self-made multi-millionaire Rob White and self-made multi-millionaire Jorge P. Newbery, both of whom by no coincidence have more than one book on My Reading List for My Mentees.
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
power-in-acceptance.jpg
Juanita Phelps wrote: ↑May 8th, 2024, 7:41 pm On the topic of the starving child vs the starving millions of children, have you ever watched the 1949 movie version of “Little Women” in which the girls are discussing sharing their breakfast with a poor famiiy?Hi, Juanita Phelps,
Jo wants to take their Christmas breakfast to a poor family, but Amy is selfish, and she says something about people starving everywhere. Jo counters with, “We don’t know them, but we do know Mrs. Hummel,” or something to that effect. Your comments reminded me of this movie. They took their breakfast to share with the poor woman and her many children.
Puckett Elizabeth Marie wrote: ↑April 24th, 2024, 1:18 pm Am really scared starting my life as a young person. How did you deal with it during youthful era.
Risper Ouma Lisa Anyango wrote: ↑April 26th, 2024, 8:46 amEckhart Aurelius Hughes wrote: ↑October 11th, 2023, 12:22 amHi Scott.
If I choose to hatefully point a gun at an innocent little baby and fire, not realizing I am dreaming, and then wake up before the bullet strikes, my choice to murder that baby was still real. That hateful or otherwise murderous intent was still real, even if the baby and the gun was not. In a sense, I am still really a hateful murderer even if I wake up after committing the murder to find I was dreaming without realizing it.
Are you saying that we have control of our dreams and we are responsibility for what happened in a dream? Suppose I commit murder in a dream, does it mean I am now a murderer.
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes wrote: ↑October 11th, 2023, 12:22 amI appreciate this question and response.Thera reads wrote: ↑October 10th, 2023, 10:27 pm I want to have a wider view on philosophy. After watching the Truman Show, I'm beginning to wonder if anything is real. What do you think?Hi, Thera reads,
Great question!
I love The Truman Show. I'm also fan of some of these other movies that have a similar way of exploring the concept of reality itself:
- The Matrix
- Vanilla Sky
- Fight Club
- Jacob's Ladder
- Free Guy
However, we don't have to rely on fiction or the age-old question about whether you might be dreaming right now as you read this. Modern science has shown that waking life is at best almost entirely just as much a hallucination as a conventional dream. Your brain is like a PlayStation or Xbox creating this VR world, the same as it does when you are having a sleeping dream, but at best your brain is really just in a dark quiet skull with no light or sound. Here is a post I wrote about that subject that I think you might like:
Commentary on self-transcendence, ego death, and dying before you die; with a finger snap more brutal than Thanos
There's definitely a lot of things that we typically treat as real due to misleading intuitions and/or for practical purposes that definitely aren't real.
But we can start to get a grasp for what definitely is real by playing with the idea of this life and this world being an actual dream. Let's assume you are dreaming right now. Or make it not pretend by literally reminding yourself to literally ask yourself this question next time you are sleeping at night having an actual literal conventional dream. You can talk about it with the other characters in the dream world. Maybe literally have a debate with yourself in your dream tonight.
There's an undeniable reality to your consciousness itself, meaning you yourself, meaning your true self, the real you. From that, there's other equally undeniable realities. What you feel is one. A hallucination or dream or even the story in a fictional book doesn't need to be real for the way it makes you feel to be real. Your experience of it is real. A nightmare is really scary regardless of its reality. Fiction has a way of becoming real when it is experienced (and/or created) by consciousness.
In my book, In It Together, I write that even a dream is real if it is consciosuly dreamt.
What you see may be a hallucination, but that you see it is not.
Your true intentions and the choices you make are real, no matter what.
Just because you are playing virtual poker instead of with real cards, your choice to play those cards--real or not--the way you do is real. Your choice to unconditionally accept the cards you are dealt versus hate and resent what you cannot control is real. The cards your dealt don't need to be real for your choice of how to play them to be real. The cards your dealt don't need to be real for this to be real: your choice to lovingly accept them versus choosing to engage in miserable impotent resentment or hate of them.
The hate you choose to have in your heart, if any, is real.
Or, if instead, you choose to practice love and acceptance, that is real. The love is real. The choice is real.
That is, in part, what I mean in the book when I write, "Not even a god can come between you and your choices."
Your choices and intentions are real, even if what allegedly actually happens as a result of those intentions and choices cannot be known or is not even real.
If I choose to hatefully point a gun at an innocent little baby and fire, not realizing I am dreaming, and then wake up before the bullet strikes, my choice to murder that baby was still real. That hateful or otherwise murderous intent was still real, even if the baby and the gun was not. In a sense, I am still really a hateful murderer even if I wake up after committing the murder to find I was dreaming without realizing it.
That's why I don't commit murder and why I don't engage in miserable resentment or hate, neither in my dreams at night nor in this waking life we often falsely treat as so much realer than our dreams even though it clearly is not.
For some things, the ends don't and can't justify the means because the means are undeniably real and the alleged ends are not.
It's not just the choice or intent to commit hateful miserable murder. The same goes for things the like the choice to be honest and brave versus being a coward and lying thieving cheater. These choices are undeniable real, even if one is dreaming while one makes them, or unknowing living the The Matrix or The Truman Show.
The hate or love you have is real. Your choice to do your best to put that love--or hate--into practice is undeniably real.
That is in large part why I say that to have hate in your heart is to be in hell. One like that will be miserable hateful while dreaming and miserably hateful while awake. They will be miserable hateful while in the north and miserable hateful in the south. The miserable hate they have is real, and so no dreamy forms or possibly fictional worlds can cover it up or give them an escape. It's all just a different mask on the same real thing.
In contrast, to have unconditional love in your heart for everyone and everything is to be in heaven. The masks and covers change, but the reality beneath does not.
I am in heaven before I fall asleep at night, I am in heaven while in my sleeping dreams, and then still I am in heaven when I awake in the morning to this waking life we falsely think of as so much realer than our dream worlds at night.
For better or worse, we can't escape our own hearts, by which I really mean our own spirits and choices. What's in there is real, and it stays wirh us with through all these dreamy dancing forms in these quickly changing worlds, like an unconcealable scar on the face of an actor playing different roles in different moves. It's a glimpse of the real sneaking into the fiction. It's a peak at the naked constant underneath the ever-changing clothes.
What my book calls the real you is real.
In a way, the clothes never are.
With love,
Eckhart Aurelius Hughes
a.k.a. Scott
seneca-quote.png
Bakka Bhai wrote: ↑May 15th, 2024, 8:55 am Was there ever a point in your life when you thought that you couldn't go further? Like did you ever get frustrated enough to just leave everything?
Bakka Bhai wrote: ↑May 15th, 2024, 8:59 am Also, question 2nd. Whenever I pick a new hobby or a task, I'm very confident and happy and interested in it at first. But then I just get tired and bored of it. Did you ever feel like it? If yes, please tell me what must be done to get rid of it?
In It Together (Page 4) wrote:There is always more money to make or more fame to achieve. It is a constant, endless chain of desire. If you get this, then you will want that, and if you get that, then you will want this, or something else, something more. You cannot eliminate desire by fulfilling desire. Fulfillment causes desire and goals to be replaced, not eliminated. You cannot achieve a state of goallessness by achieving goals. So long as you live as a human, you will have unfulfilled desires and unachieved goals, as the human body and mind will always want more and will invariably create new goals once old goals have been achieved.
In It Together (Page 112) wrote:Without the contentment of inner peace, the grass is always greener on the other side and never green enough where one is.
In It Together (Page 113) wrote:No matter how much you feed the body and ego, it will only get hungrier. In terms of that figurative hunger, the greedy always starve, damned to a living hell of their own insatiability.
No matter how much you chase greener grass, it will never be green enough, and it will always appear greener on the other side. There will always be greener to reach. You will be stuck in a cycle of addiction, always discontent with where you are, always discontent with the grass upon which you stand, always chasing ever greener grass, always fighting, never winning, always lacking inner peace.
You cannot feed the spirit with the body’s food.
In It Together (Page 173) wrote:If you define happiness as having no unachieved goals, and wait to have inner peace until you achieve all your goals and fulfill your desires, it will never happen. That's a future that does not exist, that cannot exist.
This process of trying to get to that living heaven on Earth by feeding the insatiable body and ego, of foolishly trying to actually satiate it, is called the hedonic treadmill.
Inner peace does not exist at the end of the hedonic treadmill. Nothing does. Nothing does because the end of that treadmill does not exist.
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