Motivation

Finding jobs during my summers in college was a challenge to which I was not up. I have never been good at finding jobs, truth be told. They tend to find me.

Teresa says that when you stop trying for things, they happen. Maybe, but in college, I needed summer jobs and I had a hard time finding them. I should note, in a fit of sibling bitter pique, that my brother never seemed to need a summer job, for some reason. But that's a story for another time. One particularly low moment involved my going to an interview. I didn't know what the job was, but they had advertised in the local paper for "college students." It turned out to be an "opportunity" for selling encyclopedias door to door. It seems quaint now, the notion of encyclopedia BOOKS sold door-to-door, doesn't it?

The encyclopedias in question, by the way, were not your big names. No World Book, no Britannica.

Britannica aside: We had a very old set of Britannicas in our basement. I didn't do well on my report on the moon in 4th grade when I noted (using the EB) that someday people might get to the moon. It was neat set, though, as my great-grandfather had read most of it and annotated a lot of it. I met him once when he was very old and I was very young. Mostly, I remember his large hands. I've always been glad to be able to get a little glimpse at how he interacted with the world. Small careful pencil marks.

At any rate, in the door-to-door interview I was asked how many sets of encyclopedias I thought I could sell in a week. I thought about it and replied, "one." That seemed about right to me. He was appalled and said something to the effect that if I could only sell one set, this was probably not the right job for me. I agreed with a depth of feeling not usually expressed in employment situations and vacated the premises post haste.

I spent part of that summer delivering pizzas and another part back at college taking summer school classes. Neither was great, but there were no sales involved.

I thought about all of this last night when, during the course of a discussion in the class I'm teaching this term, I mentioned how motivated people are by inconsistent rewards. Very much like some experiments done on pigeons, if we're rewarded but there's no real pattern to the reward, we'll persist in believing the reward could come again at any time. Las Vegas thrives on our motivation in this manner.

One of my students raised her hand and went into a five minute monologue about selling and being taught by Anthony Robbins and The Secret and how all you had to do was believe and things would come true. At the end of her moment, I mumbled something about how well motivational speakers and authors know psychology and changed the subject. After class it did occur to me that perhaps I had missed my calling all those years ago. If I had only BELIEVED in my ability to sell, I may have been able to--I don't know--sell TWO encyclopedia sets a week.

An aside, I seem to have lost my calendar after class last night. I'm, sure were I better motivated that would not have happened.