Motivation is a funny thing. They often ask me about it, and I do not know what to tell them. Some things come to us as naturally as breathing does to everyone. A painter sees colours in everything. No matter how you put it, to them it will be as natural as the rain. And I find in me a hunger for knowledge and understanding, and I find in me the intrinsic motivation to do things, anything, to be consistently and often perversely interested in things. I use ‘perverse’ since I know it often has detrimental effects on my well-being and often bodes poorly that I want to do everything, to be all I can be and more, and to continually get better at living. A hamster who designs his own wheel and then runs in it. It is a funny way to live, and often, it makes no sense to me either. But this hamster has a compulsion, and if it were living in some hole under a garden or if it were living in some dirty street that reeks, it would always find the compulsion to build the wheel and then to run in it, and then, to make it all better, and try it all again. And that it is as natural to it as gnawing, and there is not a thing in the world it can do about it.
Now, I believe there was a career in this for me—a guru, a speaker at a seminar preaching sugar-coated platitudes. It is the only thing that makes sense to do, and here I am, making things no one needs, writing words no one reads. It is a unique talent to not just be out of touch with reality in how you think, but even if you could somehow reach a widely accepted conclusion, you would not be able to act upon it. Some of us are ill-adjusted to the world in this way. We are this way because we are absurdly well-adjusted and entirely in tune with ourselves. Our existence is a declaration of rebellion. They can never put us into boxes, for we would fit in all of them and none of them at the same time, and to be this way and to not reject it, to not fight it, to be incongruous and to be proud of it silently, like a flower growing in a garden stands tall for no other reason but because it can. This is what I have learned about myself, and perhaps it is what motivates me. How else could you answer a question like that?