What Keeps Me Motivated?

The enemies I made on the road have been some of my most reliable colleagues. They show up every morning without being asked.

I am hardheaded, and some of my work exists because I remember a sentence said to my face in a particular tone. I can hear exactly which person would smile if I got it wrong. I know what I am supposed to say about this. Let go. Move on. Do the work for yourself. I have done quite a lot of work for myself while imagining how annoyed somebody else would be to see it finished.

I also recognize how readily I take to something I am not supposed to be able to do. A field I have no credentials in, a problem above my weight, a room where I am easy to underestimate. Doubt can make me stubborn before it makes me careful. That has helped me begin things. It has also made me reluctant to put them down.

I think of Tamazgha here, and the stories of resistance I inherited. Ordinary people, farmers, shepherds, families with very little, refusing a future someone more powerful had chosen for them. What stayed with me was the memory of having answered. I recognize something of that in my refusal to hear a person’s doubt as a final verdict, even when I am giving that person far too much space in my day.

There is a rule, though. Spite gets a vote on how hard I work, never on what I work on. The question has to interest me before I bring anyone else’s opinion into it. Otherwise I could spend years answering a person who was wrong about me and end up with work I never wanted to do.

Most things I have built began with an open-ended question. No assignment, no guarantee that there was anything at the bottom. Something seemed odd, or possible, or worth trying, and I wanted to see what would happen. That is still the part I enjoy most, before I have a result to explain or a reason to make it look important.

And the curiosity is funnier than I usually make it sound. I like the moment when I understand something well enough to make a joke about it. There is pleasure in catching an observation from an angle I had missed, in finding that an idea I had been treating solemnly can suddenly be played with. The days the jokes come easily are the days the understanding is moving.

In the football essay, I wrote about having trouble celebrating my own milestones. The pleasure of working something out reaches me more easily. I can enjoy the question for months and still be strangely quiet when the result finally arrives. I have learned enough about myself to expect that mismatch. I am still learning what to do with it.

There are other people I think about with much more affection. Friends, mentees, younger people walking a version of the path I walked. I can tell them where I got stuck. Sometimes they can miss a trap because I have already spent enough time in it for both of us.

I wrote about the unnamed mentors who showed me possibilities by living them. I cannot repay all of that to the people who gave it to me. But I can make some of what I learned available to whoever comes next. A bad year does not become a good year because someone else learns from it. I am still glad they might be spared part of it.

I do not wake up feeling all of these reasons every morning. Disappointment, the flatness after good news, a rejection, or an ordinary bad mood can be there while I keep working. Sometimes I can leave the feeling alone for a while and follow the plan I made before it arrived.

Sometimes I am too good at that.

When the question is good enough, I disappear into the work. Weeks, sometimes months, where I forget meals, forget rest, and eventually forget to keep track of the person doing it. Some of the work I am proudest of came from that state. So did burnout. While I am inside it, the distinction is difficult to make. It feels like purpose. It feels like finally getting somewhere.

I try to notice the pull earlier now, while I can still ask whether I can afford to spend this much of myself on the question. I fail at that regularly. The work is very persuasive when I am the one making its case.

So the people around me matter in a way I used to underestimate. I have a joke I call the moon test. Tell the room you are going to touch the moon and watch its face. I want people who can take an unlikely ambition seriously. They can question the plan. I need that too. But I want to be able to bring them an unfinished thought without first making it safe from laughter.

And I need somewhere I do not have to arrive with an ambition at all. A place, a handful of people, where I can turn my brain off and just be. The open questions have often arrived there, while I was away from the effort of trying to produce one. I am glad of that, though I do not want every evening away from work to need a useful idea as its excuse.

Those people can reach me when the work has made me difficult to reach. They can pull me back out for an evening, back into being a person, which is the thing the work forgets I am.