I’m wearing Batman socks today, as well as an orange shirt from many years ago that made an ex of mine realize that he actually liked bright colors. Because of these itty bitty little objects, I can feel power and excitement surging through my veins. I feel like I have super powers.
So, I spoke with my mother today on the phone about my research. She wanted to know why I sounded like Eyore on the phone whenever the subject of my research came up. I tried to explain to her that I was just not excited by it. That I didn’t know what I was doing. That I was unmotivated and unenthusiatic about it, so every time I even considered coming to campus to work on it, my heart sank. I realized, as I chatted with her, that I’ve been struggling to do this project for months and months because I never bothered to get myself interested in the background of the project. To just expect myself to pick something up in a completely new field that I’ve never studied in and suddenly want to work on it, without understanding the need for that tool, without really having a feel for the context of why the work is being done, is something that I just am incapable of doing. Without the context, I loose all interest in the actual problem. So, in future, I need to remember that for me: motivation is born of contextualization.
