Anything you do gets done faster and produces better results if you have the drive to do it. A drive that pushes you, that sets new limits and that forces you to seek new sources to power yourself.
When you see someone with that drive within themselves, you can immediately recognise it. They have a different persona: they are brimming with confidence, they bring great enthusiasm to the table and they make a difference to the people around them. Their work is a source of inspiration to their peers or to the generations to follow.
There may be many reasons for why you have the drive to do what you do. It may be because that thing is on your to-do list, or it might be something that you have wanted all your life, or anything in between. The drive might exist because of some fear that has been troubling you or because of that anxiety which you find unsettling. It could stem from a desire to take revenge or simply because of an inspiration to do something for your loved one.
Whatever may be the reasons, having the drive to do something is a powerful tool to be able to leverage. Not only does it give you an edge over your competitor but it also gives you a lot more pleasure in what you do. It makes you feel that the effort you put in to doing something is worth it. That drive enables you to overcome the pain to experience the joys.
Now here’s the million dollar question:
What if you could control your drive, turn it up when you want?
I don’t claim that I have the answer and to be frank, it will be hard to convince me that there is only one answer. Each individual will have their methods to crank up ‘the drive’ they possess. And I think it is good to have more than one absolute way of being able to create a powerful force within you which will help you achieve your goals.
I certainly have my multiple ways of generating that drive for myself. One that I would like to talk about today is the method of raising the bar or the method of trivialising the achieved.
Here is how it works: Say you have just achieved X and have now you set yourself a new goal Y. You can now generate that drive to do Y by reflecting upon your previous achievement, X. You find ways of convincing yourself why Y, if achieved, will be a bigger achievement than X. That is a perfectly sound reason for you to push yourself to achieve Y. At the same time you may also find aspects of X which you can consciously trivialise because now you have the skill/confidence to be able to do X again. For Y though, you will need new skills and extra confidence. Another reason for why you should go after Y given X has been achieved.
The drive generated by this method can be as strong as you want it to be. You will have to put in the effort to better reason for Y over X.
The biggest advantage of this method is that it can set in to motion a machine that generates ‘a drive’ for you. All you need to do is make sure you fuel it up when necessary. Fuelling the tank up shouldn’t be that hard, after all it is a simple trick that you consciously play with your own mind.
Akshat Rathi 
I think most people find it difficult to motivate themselves by force of will alone. Ariella told me that when she organised for EWB in Australia she had a three-tiered approach to motivation: First is motivation from the cause itself, but this is simply not enough to sustain motivation indefinitely in all situations, so the second layer was motivation from fun: the work itself should be enjoyable, but it’s just not possible to always make work fun, so the third tier was friendship: that you would work through tough times buoyed by friendship with colleagues and co-workers.
That is a neat way of putting it. And I am sure you may have realised that we have been using this three tiered motivation trick in our lives…may be just not actively. Probably, through practice this system can be ingrained..as a habit..and then you don’t have to actively think about it. You will automatically change a layer when one wears out. No? I think this is seriously cool!
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