A rant: "Why am I not motivated?"

I've recently met up with a classmate of mine. She was the "good student" who would do her homework and put in efforts during exams. It's no wonder she is a straight Aces student.

However, when we met up, she told me that her motivation level has dropped and she find it harder to "move" herself.

We discussed about the possible reasons like rewards, challenge and goals and then we came to an interesting topic.

Ratio.

Rewards and effort ratio.

It's obvious that during the schooling years, the rewards you receive are very much in relation to the amount of efforts you put in.

If you put in the effort to study, you'll see improvements in your results, if you put in effort in your project work, you'll probably get a pass at least for your efforts. While this ratio might change slightly as you progress to higher education, the principle is still there; you work hard, you get results.

However, after stepping into the "real" world, how many times are your efforts really rewarded? How many times did you put in the efforts only to get rejections and nothing back?

We talked about this ... and unfortunately we didn't come to a positive conclusion. In fact we came to a conclusion that maybe that's why she is not longer as motivated as before.

There are just too much factors other than efforts that would lead to rewards, and we can't do much about that.

Well, sorry for a not so positive update, but that is the conclusion we got, at least for now.