Beauty, fun and motivation

Have you ever experienced a time when you were doing things that you really enjoyed, had a lot of things going on and had a great time and then the things you did ended for some reason (say summer vacation ended, or music camp was done) then tried looking for other things to do that but couldn't think or find anything that was exciting for you to do? I am sort of at that point at the moment and so thinking about this has made me wonder "what motivates people?"

Motivation to me is some thing really really important. You can tell the big difference between a really motivated person versus a person that is just doing things to get by. With motivation, there is a sense of purpose for what you are doing, it means something to you. When things mean something to you, it becomes important and you become obervant about it and then you learn a lot about it. Without motivation, it might feel like you're doing meaningless stuff.

Take for example. Learning math. Cliche has it that math is boring and most of us don't use it in the real world. I couldn't think that that statement is further from the truth. Why is it that we study strange things like the differential equations and matrix equations or learning how to solve simpler things like ax^2 + bx + c = 0 back in the old days of high school math? What was the meaning of it? You learn that it is useful later on when solving things like a differential equation when you look for the roots of higher order polynomials. At the time it was just academic acrobatics for me... (well that was just one application, but there are more... and simpler applications :)

It was probably a miracle that I learned math-- I did it because I thought it was fun (especially the physics related problems!). I only thought it was beautiful later on when I realized that I could use math to model things like a bank account and project it what it might look like when a person turns 65 (it's a first order differential equation), do thing like image processing and find targets in a picture or do probability calculations for poker which earned me a lot of money (note to poker gang in Canada... pretend you never read that last statement :). *Now that's beautiful!*

You know what? I also sucked in math in my first year in University. Hell I even got 64% in my first calculus course simply because I wasn't motivated. Little would I know that I would end up teaching it years later to a first year student that failed her first mid-term and walked out of the course getting 90%+ on her final exam. The reason I became good at the math was I suddenly discovered how beautiful it was. I remember solving on my own that the area of the circle was pi*r^2 and the volume of a sphere was 4/3*pi*r^3. I finally got this when I a playing with the basic integral equations I learned...

I never really started to understand calculus math until my second/third year of University, when I was taking a fluid dynamics course and we had to calculate the flow through a pipe (water flows slower at the edges of the pipe and faster in the center) or things like the total pressure of the water acting on an object in water (the interesting thing was pressure increases as you go deeper in water, that is why nitrogen gets compressed into the blood in divers and comming up too quickly causes nitrogen to bubble out of the blood inside your body and causes the 'bends' illness). I thought learning things like that was wonderful because the math I was learning suddenly became useful. Since then my math marks jumped up, math became interesting to me again and I really enjoyed teaching why math was interesting to other people.

There is a reason why I am writing this-- I am having a hell of a time right now buckling down and studying Japanese like mad. I know I have 1900 Japanese characters to learn, then there is vocabulary and then I need to find my own style of self expression. I borrowed a Japanese novel a few weeks ago... I spent 2 hours reading 9 pages. I got tired and fell asleep after that and couldn't bring myself to read those books afterwards.

There is another reason-- I've been reading research papers to learn more about the field. I have a hell of a time trying to read into these papers because I keep getting really tired when I read these papers and I don't feel that I've learned anything valuable after reading them. So I am having mental road blocks from looking into them at the moment.

Instead, what have I been doing? I've been playing computer games instead in my room, late at night when I have "nothing else to do." I play things called "turn based strategy games" and I love these games to bits. I love all sorts of strategy games and play them for hours on end. I've even done calculations for one strategy game to try and find the most optimal method of growing my empire and seeing what are the costs for making certain trade offs (do I buy that fancy tank now or do I wait and invest more in factories and get that tank later?). I like playing these games because I understand the mechanics of these games really well. The manual tells me exatly how the basic laws of the game work and what are the formulas. With this information, I can make the decisions on how to apply them to find ways of beating my opponents effectively (or understand how exactly I lost).

The trick behind this all is understanding what motivates you to do/learn things and foster the right conditions for you to become motivated. I'm probably just frustrated about the way I'm learning Japanese Kanji and my research topic because the stuff I'm reading is ugly, boring and unmotivating (is that a word?).