Motivation: Final Post

Throughout the past 3 months, I have learned many different and new concepts in this course; I will briefly cover a couple of those here. To begin, the whole idea of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation fascinated me. I definitely would consider myself to be mostly motivated by extrinsic forces; I love to compete against others. I also found the topic of introversion and extroversion. The premise of trying to figure out why people are the way they are has always interested me, and this is just another trait that deals with that. In terms of me, I am undoubtedly an extrovert; I am very outgoing and love to be around people most of the time. This course was highly informative about a very interesting topic, motivation is something that every human being grapples with on a daily basis, some more than others, but it is a topic that most of the general population can connect with.

If I had to narrow it down, I would definitely have to say my favorite topic that was covered this semester was the universal motives of sex, fear, food, and music. I liked the specific example that was shown on a video during one class; it was about this special group of hunters in Africa who would spend days hunting a single animal. They would exhaust astonishing amounts of energy to hunt a single animal with one goal: to feed their families. When I actually thought about this topic I found it really amazing that no matter how different cultures may be in the world, we all really do have the same reasons for doing what we do. Everybody wants to survive, people need to eat, people need to reproduce, and people get scared; no matter how far people may be from each other, we all share these innate traits as human beings.

Of course many of the topics we have discussed can relate to everyday life. Take procrastination for example, what better environment to relate to than a college campus? Mate selection, once again another topic that is very prevalent in a college setting. Like I previously stated, motivation is a constant factor that people deal with each and every day, and there are biological factors and psychological factors that each person possesses and this is why people handle various situations in different ways. My last thought is this, some things never change; no matter what day in age, people will always be different.