Fear as Motivation

I had my SPOP Returner interview this morning and after the session I was still thinking about a lot the things I said in it. Yet, one that I kept thinking about was fear and how it affects people. I was really nervous before, during, and even a little bit after the interview and to be honest part of me is afraid I'm not good enough to be a returner. Thinking upon those things, I've come to realize one thing: fear drives us.

Why? Let's take the opposite of fear. What is the opposite of fear? Not happiness, but rather, contentness and comfortability. Comfort leads to nothingness. When someone is comfortable, that individual is happy and there is no stimulus to do anything productive or any need to step outside one's own comfort zone because there is no need to. When things are comfortable, things are stagnant, static, unchanging - it all remains the same. There is no change because there is no need for change because things are good the way it is.

When there is fear, fear of inadequacy, fear of failure to others and to self, then there is an internal stimulus to strive for the betterment of self and perhaps of others. I know too many people who are just plain happy in their station in life right now. Heck, I've been one of those people until I met people who told me otherwise. For an example of this fear, we can look to the animal kingdom. In it, tigers are driven to be fast in order to hunt and gazelles are driven to be fast in order to not caught. It is the fear of not eating and not being eaten that drives them.

Throughout high school, I was afraid I wasn't going to get into a good university, so I worked my butt off during extracurriculars and all the homework I assigned (and then some). And once I got into UCI, I stopped. I don't know why, maybe because I found some sort of contentness and comfortablilty here or perhaps I didn't care as much because my parents weren't riding me to do well in school, because hey, I'm already in college. I need to find that motivation again. I need to find that motivation I had where I was studious like no other, where I went to the gym like no other. I will find it.