Motivation

Tareq al-Suwaidan defines motivation as a person receiving a reward — verbal, positional or material — and it covers for him both encouragement and deterrence ^{1 2}. He opens the lesson with the 'six-four-one' game to prove that motivation is not always effective: an eager player who does not know the game's rules loses however much he is motivated; motivation fails without inner desire, and without knowledge, planning and experience preceding it ^{3 4 5}.

He sets three conditions: an inner desire in the person concerned — one who does not want is unmoved by the strongest encouragement or deterrence, citing the Muslims killed under torture who never consented — then knowledge and planning, then experience; the effect of motivation only begins after all that ^{6 7}. He holds that sermons rousing the ummah with its past glories — without a plan, knowledge, leadership or experience — will not build a renaissance: the Islamic armies used to prepare, train and plan, and the motivation came at the battle (the speaker's view) ^{8 9}.

He ranks the motivators: money motivates, praise motivates, ambition, inner satisfaction and self-respect motivate; second-highest is bearing responsibility joined to fitting authority; and the highest degree of motivation, to him, is belief in an idea, a cause or a creed — for one who believes in an idea does not need others' motivation and does not stop if it is absent ^{10 11 12 2}. He generalises the principle to every deep belief in an idea — true or false — citing a Palestinian youth convinced of his cause, the Japanese Red Army, the Basques and the Tamils — and, in his reading, Abu Jahl as one driven by tribal solidarity, not by the idols ^{13 14}. To deepen an idea in souls he lists means: persuasion, logic and dialogue; stories and parables; the living and the earlier exemplar — whence the stories of the prophets — and sometimes the threat of a profound loss ^{15 16}.

He counts the end-of-year honouring of a single 'ideal employee' or 'top student' a failed philosophy: honour him again and the rest are aggrieved; honour another and he is broken ^{17 18}. He attributes to Stephen Covey the story of a company that honoured fifty of its nine hundred and eighty employees at its annual ceremony; Covey asked its head: did you hire successes or failures? and if you picked successes, what did you do to them that they became failures ¹⁹. He recounts his own experiment at the American Creativity Academy: a students' bank dealing in points, not money — six points for every A, five for a B, plus points for conduct and activity — and prizes at year's end including travel tickets and shares, a special prize for the most improved student, and the option of saving points for the next year; so everyone is rewarded, not one ^{20 21}. Of his own children he says he does not reward success in its moment but links them to the idea and the goal, not the prize (his view, which he admits may depart from custom) ^{22 23}.