Hope and Fear

Hope and fear are a big part of everyone’s life whether they know it or not. In school and work, people hope to get a good grade or a good performance review, and fear missing a deadline or making a mistake on a project. It’s the same reason I’m writing this blog, to avoid a bad grade and get a good one. I believe that hope and fear are both of the forces that motivate people, with hope on one end of the spectrum and fear on the other. Either one can easily replace the other depending on how your mentality in a situation, and both can be equally effective as the other. Most of the time people are motivated by a mixture of the two, instead of just one.

In the book Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Okonkwo is a great example of motivation by fear. He constantly worries that he will end up like his father, and has the same worries about his children. This is the reason he is so desperate to repair his reputation after returning from being banished. He is motivated through fear to make sure he has a good reputation among Umofia, and that is what eventually leads to his downfall. I think that the reason Okonkwo comes to such an unfortunate end is because when someone is motivated by fear, they become reckless to avoid the impending punishment, and do things like make a connection to a book they read a month ago in order to reach a word count.

In the book Wool by Hugh Howey, there is a good example of a different motivating force which is hope. In the first part of the book, Sheriff Holston’s wife Allison discovers a system that is creating false images to display on screens somewhere in the silo. She assumes this means that the screens displaying the outside of the silo are false images, and goes outside to her death. This event is a great example of how hope motivates. Allison hoped that the barren toxic wasteland she knew was actually a green grassy world that was being hidden from them. She rushes outside only to find she is wrong, which is the downside of being motivated by hope. When people are motivated by hope they rush to the reward they think is at the end of their efforts, and make mistakes that could replace their reward with a punishment.

After reading books like these two, my conclusion is that there is no perfect motivating force. Both hope and fear have significant downfalls that can only be fixed by the presence of the other factors. Overall, the best motivator is enough hope to keep you excited about what you’re doing and influence you to do your best, and enough fear to keep you are cautious about mistakes.