Is fear or love the only motivation?

Your motivation to work by Dieter Lange.

Following the speaker Dieter Lange, a famous management trainer, there are only two motivations to work: fear and love.

I would agree with the first one as every strive for becoming rich or important is just driven by fear one way or the other. But I don’t agree with the second one. Love is not the only motivation in all the remaining cases. There is an other player on the ground: inspiration. Admittedly, while most people work out of fear, only few are driven by love, but a minuscule share is solely motivated by inspiration.

So, why inspiration as a motivating factor is neglected even by experienced coaches as Dieter Lange?

1. He may have no idea.
2. Most people don’t care anyway.
3. Love is the widest known inspiring force, so it is generally considered the same.

Although most people think that love is the only possible inspiration, it is not. Admittedly there are numerous love songs that are certainly inspire by love. But what about the exceptions. Was Leonardo daVinci inspired love or Einstein? Still possible; we don’t know. But what about J.S. Bach who in his most productive period composed a church cantata every week? If he had been so deeply in love, he probably wouldn’t be able to compose so much music but would search other ways to seek satisfaction, and moreover his cantatas would thematize love in some way, and not political issues wrapped into biblical stories.

Conclusively there are other inspiring factors aside from love. Some people can get inspired by other people without falling in love with them. Maybe this is the case even with some heterosexual men listening to Dieter Lange. But this holds true not only for humans or other living object like pets, it happens even with non-living objects. This is typical for works of art. Painters can get also inspired by landscapes or stilllifes, too. Some would try to overcome this flaw by calling it love to art, nature, and so on. But it definitely isn’t what most people understand by love.

Finally why bother about those rather exotic examples? Because they matter the most. They are all important for humanity to persist. While working out of fear or love is just appropriate for toiling, to carry out the tedious tasks that are necessary to maintain and survive. Inspiration is necessary for creativity to bring new things into life, to advance. All social progress is based on inspiration.

This by the way is the reason why physics didn’t made any significant progress in the last century. Sabine Hossenfelder and many others are extensively lamenting about it. The reason is any scientific progress is only allowed in an academic environment where fear rules. Remember Einstein was not an academic, when he formulated his theory. That means creativity in physics needs an environment free of fear. And love in its narrow sense wouldn’t be enough, too. It needs inspiration by a vision.

What is true for physics holds true for other fields as well, of course.