Motivation

Generally speaking, people that have ASD have problems with motivation. For me at least, this leads to procrastination and eventually panic when I realize I haven't done what I was supposed to do. Buy I graduated from college, you don't get a degree without a little discipline. So here's what I did.

I have a plan: I want to be creative in some shape of form preferably in video games (see my other blog). However, these jobs require a lot of work, so what I did to motivate myself throughout school and college was to gather info for my stories.

My degree is in history, so while I do enjoy history and reading (I am VERY good at history, lol) I looked for things that caught my interest while taking important notes.

Per example: while studying Chinese history I found out that the rise and fall of emperors depended on the Yellow River (yes I know it's an awful name). Why is this river so important? Well, first of all it flows through China. It's kind of like how the Mississippi river is important to us or what used to be the importance of the Panama Canal. The river was important to farmers and to trade. If the river flooded it would destroy many homes and towns. This disaster could be avoided if the emperor had control over the people and had them make barriers and dams. Should the emperor fail in this endeavor, the people would most likely start a coup. It wouldn't be long before the Emperor was dethroned by his own people or by rival politicians. Failure to properly prepare and control the river equaled failure to rule. Now keep in mind It's been 3 years since I've read Chinese history so I'm a little rusty. This is just my annotated version.

So I'm sitting there in my class thinking "This is really cool! An entire empire dependent on whether or not a leader could prevent a disaster. This would make a great story!" So I've begun to include this idea into my story.

This is what motivates me. The hope that someday I could use this knowledge to be creative. That's what worked for me though, I don't know how to motivate other people but it might work.