Appreciation is harmful

It is needed for undermotivated people

Did you crave for the “Great!” reply from your boss for the email you have sent on the progress of the sales? Did you anytime think that you were not being sufficiently appreciated for the “great work” done by you? Did you want your mother to cherish the moments you woke up early once in a hundred eons and did you expect a gift from your father for getting a good grade in school or a job? Then, let me reveal to you a piece of bad news. You are seriously undermotivated to achieve anything in your career or in your life.

Photo by Carrie Beth Williams on Unsplash

Ok, if you have recovered from the shock you just went in, let me tell you that the corporate and the so-called life coaches are just covering the truth with butter and hiding the truth. Appreciation may be a humble trait of an effective leader but it is not a trait of a warrior. A warrior fights the war. He knows that it is his duty. He is motivated only by the heads he cut, not by the flowers he receives as a token of appreciation. You should fight for your goals like a warrior. You should not be waiting for someone to follow in your footsteps and present you with a cake every time you reach a milestone. You need to be satisfied with yourself. if the milestone is reached, tap yourself on your shoulder and move ahead. Don’t wait for anyone to come and congratulate you. You cannot expect them to do that. It is not their fault. After all, it is not their dream, not their goals. They are yours and it doesn't mean anything to others. Your achievements may be precious to you, but for others, it is as good as their dustbin. Because, people, justly and by default “do not care!”.

You should know the indigestible truth that “Nobody cares!” After knowing this, if you expect appreciation from others again, then you are brewing fakeness and artificiality in the world, as people are by design good-natured and they will congratulate you anyway as you feel disappointed. But, their face expression does not reflect their inner feeling at that time. If you come to know later of this fakeness, your morale will be crushed down further. So, better to avoid all this drama.

Motivation part

Now come to the motivation part. Motivation is the push that is given by oneself to move his wagon called ‘dream’ by another mile. It can be anything. Including money, love, self-expression, fame, there are 9 such motivations that drive any person towards their dream according to the great author of a philosophy of success, Napolean Hill. Guess what, appreciation is not one of them. Any successful person in the entire history of success world, neither worked for appreciation nor driven by them. They worked to feed their burning desire. If you are looking for the appreciation to be the fuel of your “Wagon of dreams”, then I wish you all the best for that to move an inch forward. Even if you are surrounded by good people who do not want you to be discouraged and they appreciate you at every step taken by you, they will get tired at one moment and they go back to their work. At that time, without any delay, your vehicle stops right away without a clue to go where. At that point, if you take a look at your journey, you realize that you neither enjoyed your journey till here nor have you learned anything in this process. Because you have not come this far to learn or by learning anything. others’ appreciation of you has driven you. That would be very disastrous I say.

I warn you, don’t just take any events scheduled in your organization or in your locality with the sole purpose of appreciating or felicitating you seriously. The important trait of a natural appreciation is it is given then and there. Right away when the thing happened, without a second delay. That appreciation you get is something different. I would say that appreciation or expression of gratefulness is something cherishable throughout your life. The events scheduled after checking the free time of all the senior managers from top to bottom just to appreciate you are the gimmicks played to let you know that your work is needed by them going forward. Those events are just a pre-registration for the work expected from you in the future.

How to end this appreciation-motivation-working cycle

By this time if you convince and agree with my theory of not expecting the appreciation to motivate yourself to travel towards your goals and dreams, then you can read ahead to know how you can end this vicious cycle of appreciation-motivation-work cycle. I call it AMW cycle. This is just similar to a BMW vehicle, wherein you put the fuel and the vehicle runs till the fuel lasts. Similarly, for the ‘achievers’ who are stuck in this AMW cycle, any kind of appreciation is needed to move their vehicle. Similar to the car fuel, if the appreciation is of high grade, then the vehicle moves farther than when the appreciation is of lower grade.

As you decided to read ahead, let me reveal to you some of the easy steps to fly out of this black hole with some escaping velocity.

1. Do the work, crush the milestone, and don’t look back.
2. Just think why the person who is appreciating you now has not done the same thing at the time of achievement instantly. Then you will know the true nature of appreciation
3. Celebrate yourself. The excitement of the celebration dies down for a second time
4. Recognize the adjectives. The more jargon and heavy words studded in the appreciation, the more fake it is. A natural appreciation that comes out of instant gratification can be expressed in a very common language
5. Re-find your goals by introspection if you are in need of the appreciation weed. In this case, your current goals are not burning desires, they are just head- or heart-desires
6. Don’t let the appreciation going on for a long time. I warn you, it is addictive if it goes beyond a certain duration
7. The best advice(only if you are doing an individual project) is not to reveal anything about your work to anyone. Even after it becomes successful, calmly close the door and come out without any noise.

You, all the amazing people out there reading my piece of opinion very patiently and to the end without even moving from your place for are to be really appreciated for your sincerity, eagerness to learn, and the remarkable patience that you have shown in my article.

Does that make you happy and proud about yourself? Then you did not learn anything in the last 3 minutes.

Be god with you always!