I woke up this morning thinking about some pages I need to write for The Mull—not posts, housekeeping stuff really—and how little motivation I have to write them, because they aren't particularly interesting to me.
I do some educational consulting for teachers, and it occurred to me that I often write a course description for a college catalog for a client, without any motivational problem at all, though course descriptions have no more intrinsic interest for me than my own housekeeping pages.
The difference seems to be that I am writing the course description to help someone else.
This led me to think of all the other tasks that are easier to do when we are doing them for someone else. How often will we not go to the trouble of cooking a meal to eat alone, for instance? Yet we will cook for someone else, happily and easily, even when we are not hungry ourselves.
And how many other tasks fall into this pattern?
I leave it to you to make your own list.
If you don't have the motivation, do it for me.
