I had an epiphany today, catalyzed by two unlikely sources: Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn and speed demos. In Radiant Dawn, there’s a conversation between Yune and Ike that goes something like this:

Yune: “You humans are so interesting. You fumble around and you really don’t know what you’re doing, but you strive so hard and fight so passionately for what you believe in. Even when you don’t really know what you believe in!”

Ike: “That’s right. I’ll fight for what I believe in until my dying breath. I’ll never stop.”

And speed demos. These people practice for months, years even, to get the perfect run and get the world record on some obscure video game. They try it, then get 40 minutes in and make a mistake, so they start all over.

What’s the #1 predictor of success, at anything? Skill. What’s the #1 predictor of skill, in any domain? Time on task. And what’s the #1 predictor of time on task? Motivation. It all comes back to motivation. If you’re motivated to do something, you’ll practice it, you’ll become skilled at it, and you’ll succeed. If you’re truly passionate about something, or obsessed, or just struck by a passing fancy that takes a long time to pass, you can achieve amazing feats of awesomeness.

But what do you do when the fancy passes? Do you stick with it, or do you move on to the next thing? In the past, I’ve usually moved on to the next thing. There have been a few notable things I’ve stuck with and finished, but I often drop them and move on to something else, or to nothing productive. The question of motivation is the most important one to answer when Kyeli and I are planning our 2nd company. How are we going to motivate ourselves? If we refuse to use fear-based motivational techniques (and we do), how are we going to discover and practice love-based ones? We know that we can succeed wildly at anything when we set our minds to it, so the key becomes setting our minds to it. Or really, setting our hearts to it.