An incentive is a reason, a reason to move, to do, to think, to even live. It is the motivating force that causes us to accomplish the things in life that we do. For some there is only a limited incentive, enough to accomplish the bare minimum, to do only enough to pay the bills to avoid starvation. Others have a desire to have more, a nice car, a nice home, clothes etc. An incentive is the driving force, the reason to do whatever it is that we do. If the incentive is from within it is usually a healthy or more healthy form of incentive than those that are from without. Self motivation as opposed to being forced to do a thing from some ‘outside of self ’ force. Children growing up ofttimes come to a point (teenager) where parental nudging to be a good student or to play an instrument etc. causes them to resist and sometimes adopt a negative and even physically harmful habit or lifestyle. Positive encouragements and/or incentives usually come from parents—negatives usually come from friends. The best and most productive incentives come from within. The story I told in another of these brief “On” articles about the fourteen year old on TV that was describing how he was going to go to college, then law school and eventually become the mayor of his city and with that authority he was going to make it a safe and clean city, etc. That was a sample of an internal incentive that makes a parent proud.
As an old and retired couple, my wife and I, spend a lot of time researching our ancestors and preparing names to take to the temple. Once a month, we attend a temple in another town. We go there because we enjoy the ride through a beautiful canyon, and I arrange with the temple’s Chef, to make sure it is a time when he is preparing a Prime Rib for the noon meal in their cafeteria. My incentive should be to go for religious purposes, but I have an additional incentive to go, that of enjoying a Prime Rib meal, as well.
There is a story about a famous author whose initial incentive to write was for his wife’s wellbeing but turned into a life of writing.
One Year To Live
Anthony Burgess was 40 when he learned that he had only one year to live. He had a brain tumor that would kill him within a year. He knew he had a battle on his hands. He was completely broke at the time, and he didn’t have anything to leave behind for his wife, Lynne, soon to be a widow.
Burgess had never been a professional novelist in the past, but he always knew the potential was inside him to be a writer. So, for the sole purpose of leaving royalties behind for his wife, he put a piece of paper into a typewriter and began writing. He had no certainty that what he was writing would even be published, but he couldn’t think of anything else to do.
“It was January of 1960,” he said, “and according to the prognosis, I had a winter and spring and summer to live through, and would die with the fall of the leaf.”
In that time Burgess wrote energetically, finishing five and a half novels before the year was through (very nearly the entire lifetime output of E.M. Forster, and almost twice that of J. D. Salinger.) But Burgess did not die. His cancer had gone into remission and then disappeared altogether. In his long and full life as a novelist ( he is best known for A Clockwork Orange), he wrote more than 70 books, but without the death sentence from cancer, he may not have written at all.
Many of us are like Anthony Burgess, hiding greatness inside, waiting for some external emergency (Incentive) to bring it out. Ask yourself what you’d do if you had Anthony Burgess’s original predicament. “ If I had just a year to live, how would I live differently? What exactly would I do?”
Dr Keith Scott-Mumby stated that “People with a greater sense of purpose live longer, and sleep better. Purpose cuts the risk of stroke and depression. It helps people recover from addiction or manage their glucose levels if they are diabetic. If a pharmaceutical company could bottle such a treatment, it would make billions. But you can find it for yourself, and it’s free. Purpose dictates not just how we live, but whether we live! Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist who survived four Nazi concentration camps, including Auschwitz, noticed that some of his fellow prisoners were far more likely to survive than others. “Woe to him who saw no more sense in his life, no aim, no purpose, and therefore, no point in carrying on. He was soon lost,” he later wrote [Man’s Search For Meaning, 1946].
Frankl thought that, just as food and water can nourish and strengthen our bodies, purpose and meaning can nourish and strengthen our minds. He referred to our craving for purpose as the “will to meaning”.
There are many kinds of incentives, external, internal and even a combination, but whatever we do in this life is initiated by one type of incentive or another. The internal are the most effective, even if it be for self aggrandizement.