The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download chapter one for free at DrKenner.com and on Amazon.com.

I haven't been sleeping.

I've been clear in my head.

I felt like myself, sick,

nauseous, sleepy, her, everything looks distorted, and everything inside just kind of peaks, and you can barely find the will to complain.

Now I can think back to different periods of my life, and there were times when I just dragged my own feet. I didn't have any motivation, I didn't know where I was going, or what to do with a career, and it was just hard to wake up in the morning, get out of bed, and enjoy my life. And then there are other times when I've just felt like I've been a dynamo. I had a lot of motivation. What accounts for motivation? And if we focus on students, there are students who drag their feet, and others who are knowledge sponges. They're passionate about learning. What we're looking at today is motivation. And with me to take a closer look at this is Dr. John Lewis. He received his PhD in Classics from the University of Cambridge, England, and he's now an Assistant Professor of History at Ashland University. His specialty is Classical Greece. Dr. Lewis, welcome to the Rational Basis of Happiness.

Thank you, Dr. Kenner. With that introduction, I am motivated.

You are motivated. You're raring to go. When you look at students who are motivated, I want to focus on the good students. Can you give us a story of one or two students that you've had who stand out as having the right approach towards their own life, and what are the elements in it that make them successful?

Well, I'll give you a story of a student who wasn't too good, and I think has turned around to be probably the most improved student I've ever seen. He came into my office about a year ago. He was taking a history class from me, and he said, "Hello, Dr. Lewis, can I speak to you? I’ve got this paper I've got to do, and I just want to kind of get by, maybe get a B on it and all that. Can you help me out with that?" And I said, "You just want to get a B on it?" He said, "Yeah, that's all, a B will do me." And I said, "Well, you walk down the hall. There are all kinds of doors down the hall. There will be people to help you out to get a B. I'm not interested. Get out of here until you decide that you want to get an A." And I mean, he did a double take. I said, "I mean it, get up and walk out of here unless you want to do better than that." No one had ever spoken to him like that before. So I said, "Well, if you want to, I don’t care. You know, I'm not here to give people Bs. I'm here to give people As if they wish to earn them." And he did a serious double take, and he said, "Alright, okay." And he dug into the subject, and we did a good paper. Since then, he's taken, I think, three classes from me, and in every case, he's got the papers done before they're due. He's taking a Greek course from me in the spring that hasn't even started yet, and he's been in over vacation to do the reading and research. And he has discovered that there’s a value in using his mind. I think he really has discovered that it’s interesting. Life is better, life is happier if you have an active intellectual approach rather than just trying to get by, doing the minimum to get Bs.

One of the interesting things was, when he spoke to me, I said to him, "Why are you here in college?" He said, "Oh, I don't know. I just need to get a degree in order to get a job. You know? It’s just something that I’ve got to do." And I said to him, "If you're here out of duty, if you're out of some obligation, this is going to be a miserable four years. And you know what, it’s going to be a miserable career after that. You can't motivate yourself from duty. You’re going to have to motivate yourself from something that you love."

"But I've done it for 12 years. I did it all through high school."

I look at him, and he doesn’t sound pretty happy to me walking in here being facetious. You know, he's not really happy at all. I said, "You certainly sound happy walking in here, saying, 'Oh, well, what can I do to get by?' Does that make you happy?" "No, but this is the way life is." "No, well, you have to decide to make life something different. And if you want to do that, you can come into my office every day and I’ll talk to you, but if you just want to get a B, I'm not interested in talking to you any more than I have to."

So that’s really a choice point in his life.

And I put students, when they're worth it, in a position where they have to make a choice, and when they make a choice, it may become a good mental policy, which is what happened in the case of this student.

I think so. And I don't know that he'll ever be an A student, but he will always work at the top of his ability. And he's having a good time doing it.

So when you talked about the fact that it's fun to use your mind, or it's energizing, tell me a little bit more about that.

Well, this is something that has to come from within the student. You know, or it comes from within any of us. You can give a person the alternative, but it really has to come from within. And I do it by putting something specific in front of them and saying, "Boy, isn’t that interesting?" And my whole attitude is that this is interesting. And sometimes the students will say to me, "Boy, I'm taking five classes, and they’re all disparate areas, all different kinds of things. And I'm really interested in economics, so why do I have to take these English courses?" And I point out to them that I did exactly what they’re doing. I went to an undergraduate degree, and then two graduate degrees. I did what they’re doing. And you can decide to make different things interesting to you, because everything is interesting. Everything is interesting if you adopt an interested perspective on it. I don’t know if feeding rats Rice Krispies is interesting, just to use a joke that you made to me once, personally, in the past, but everything can be interesting. And on the other hand, the most interesting subject in the world can become dead boring if you sit there with the idea that, "Well, I don’t care," or "I'm only here out of duty."

So you're talking about motivation by duty, meaning what?

Motivation by duty means doing something because you have to do it, not because you care about the results for you.

To get a degree, or because "My parents want me to be a lawyer," right?

Suppose, for example, a person is in the university, and they’re going to get a psychology degree, and they love psychology, but in the process of getting that degree, they have to take, oh, I don’t know, statistics or foreign language that they don’t like.

Right, something outside of psychology.

They can turn that into something that is no longer a duty because it's part of getting their degree. That's part of them achieving the value they want to achieve.

So they can look at it and say, "What can I gain from studying this foreign language?"

Certainly.

"What can I gain about psychology?"

Right.

And I can give an example with that. I can remember learning... Hey, I got to interrupt this because we’ve got to pay some bills. 30 seconds, that’s it. A very quick ad, and then Alan will be back. Romance.

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And I can give an example with that. I can remember learning Morse code at 20 words a minute. And I'm thinking, I'm learning this, and I will never use it. I have no interest in it. And I said, "How can I make it interesting for myself?" And I thought, well, I can study how memory works. How long does it take me to learn different letters of the alphabet? And when do I know that I’ve got the A versus the F and the Z and the rest of them? And when do I have the whole alphabet down? And how is my mind working? So I was psychologically studying how I was learning Morse code.

That’s a great example. I can give you an example of the opposite. You know, when I was in business for many years, I hired many people, and I would always try to find out, of course, at an interview, whether a person has a work ethic and whether they're motivated to be intellectually active. That’s what you really want in business, someone who can think and someone who wants to work. And I had a young woman come in with a psychology degree who wanted a sales position. And I said to her, "You’ve got a psychology degree. What does that have to do with sales?" And she looked at me and said, "Oh, I don’t know, nothing, I guess." I mean, she didn’t even connect them. I said to myself, "Wait a minute. Psych, selling, sales, is psychology, right?"

Learning how to communicate with people and being honest.

But she didn’t have any of that kind of connection. Her psychology degree was just something she did. Who knows why she chose it? And now she’s looking for a sales job with the same attitude. Who knows why she chose sales, right? Get interested—everything is interesting.

So learning how to focus your mind versus being a mental couch potato, learning that it is actually enjoyable to use your mind to ask questions, to investigate, to come up with new angles on things, to be creative, to think about goals in your life, and to think about them long-range, not just short-range—those are some of the things we've been talking about. I want to thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Lewis.

Thanks so much, and stay cheerful. For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com and please listen to this ad. Here’s an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner:

Another reason why the view that sexual pleasure is only physical, unrelated to your mind, your values, or your character, is very wrong is that if it were purely physical, it wouldn’t matter what you think about sexual pleasure itself. But it does matter. To fully enjoy sex, you must believe that it is good. If you view sex as a guilty pleasure that must be hidden, not talked about, and thought of only with embarrassment, this will undermine your enjoyment. Dr. Lonnie Barbach, a noted clinical psychologist and expert in the field of female sexuality, observed that many of us have a "sex is good, sex is bad" script in our minds. We are told that sex is dirty, and yet we are instructed to save it for someone we love.

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com and you can buy the book on Amazon.com.