What Drives US To Succeed And Feeds Or Successes Research Paper

Personal Achievement and Motivation:

When you think about a person’s great achievements in life you generally think about the awards they have one, degrees they have earned, and milestones they have passed. But, personal achievement is really much simpler than that. Personal achievement is, according to Psychology Today, really anytime you set and meet a goal (n.d.).
One personal achievement that stands out in my mind, from my personal life, was when I was in high school, and I received a scholarship to attend college. It was only a $500 scholarship for my first semester, but I had set a goal to raise all of the money for my books and tuition in the first year in local scholarship money, and that was one of the largest scholarships available in our neighborhood.
The goal, and achieving it was important to me because, as the child of a single parent home, I knew my mom could not really afford to send me to college and the only way that I was going to get to go, without her voluntarily going into debt, was to find alternative ways to raise the money.
The greatest obstacle I had to overcome was standing out. I was a good student, but I was not in the top 5 in my class, and I could not be expected to stand out on academics alone, and while I was from a single parent home, and had no way to pay for college, I certainly did not qualify as poor either. I was thoroughly average, and when you are looking for scholarship money, that can be a real deficit. This meant that I had to find a way to stand out among all the other applicants. I was not going to have the lowest family income, or the highest GPA so I had to be the best, or brightest, in some other way. Ultimately, that meant being very honest and very passionate in my application letters. I had to use my use of language, and my personality shine through my writing and really demonstrate the kid of person I was so that they saw me, rather than simply the average numbers that represented me.
The impact that doing this had on my life was really two fold. First, it allowed me to discover the real strength of my writing and my personality. I knew that I was better than average, and that I had something special to offer the world. Secondly, it taught me something about motivation, and what motivates me personally.
A recent article in Time Magazine outlined three steps for motivating yourself: be positive, get rewarded, and find friends who will pressure you (Barker, 2014). Though I had not read this article at the time, those three steps were certainly true of me, when I was working toward this accomplishment. First, I did need to be positive. In order to differentiate myself from the group as I described above, I had to remain positive both about my own qualities, and about my deservingness. I had to believe that I could actually win the scholarship. Second, I did need the reward. Each time I got a small scholarship, it became easier to be motivated to do the work to receive the larger scholarships. In the end, it was clear that the more successful I was in collective scholarship money, the more daring I was, or more motivated I was, to continue applying for other scholarship opportunities. Finally, I did find friends who helped motivate me. I remember sitting at one friend’s kitchen table and drinking soda from fancy glasses while her mother made us warm cookies. We kept each other on track filling out college applications and writing scholarship essays together. In the end, we both had a stack of scholarship checks to carry into the Bursars office at the college of our choice.
I felt a great mix of emotions when I reached this goal. I was excited, relieved, and maybe even a little nervous as the reality of what I had decided to do, and what I had achieved became clear. It meant I could go to the college of my choice, and really move away from home for the first time. Markus A. Maier once wrote a theory that linked the emotions we have about our achievements and goal setting to long term academic performance. That has certainly been true for me. I think I am more motivated to do well in my classes because I have experienced success in the past, and because I know I want to experience those emotions, about achievement again. Baker says that we are unable to avoid our emotions and so should harness them, and use them as a motivator (2014), and that is exactly what I am doing.

References:

Achievement. (n.d.). Retrieved February 11, 2015, from http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/achievement
Barker, E. (2014, June 30). How to Motivate Yourself: 3 Steps Backed By Science. Retrieved February 11, 2015, from http://time.com/2933971/how-to-motivate-yourself-3-steps-backed-by-science/
Pekrun, R., Elliot, A., & Maier, M. (n.d.). Achievement Goals And Achievement Emotions: Testing A Model Of Their Joint Relations With Academic Performance.Journal of Educational Psychology, 115-135.
Psychology Today. (n.d.). Retrieved February 11, 2015, from https://www.psychologytoday.com/basics/motivation