The Vices Of Motivation

Sometimes our actions are not taken because of meaning or virtue

Poker is a competitive, egotistical, testosterone-soaked, and envious world. 

Poker is also a zero-sum game. Meaning, one person's win is your loss. As a result, no one enjoys seeing another person win apart from themselves. If someone says they do, they’re a filthy little liar. 

I didn’t become a professional poker player because I loved the game and enjoyed the intellectual challenge. It was a minor reason behind the decision. The real reason was that I wanted to make a lot of money and have a great lifestyle. 

A few of my older friends had become pros and did pretty well. They showed me that it was possible not to have a normal job, make some decent money and control your own time. This opened up a realm of new possibilities for me.

I thought that if they could do it, I could do it too. 

So I went pro. But the first year into my gambling endeavours, without fail, my mother would call me up once a week and tell me to get a real job. I eventually relented and found a nice graduate role with Lloyds Bank as an insurance analyst. 

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A few months into my new office job, I was planning to move into an apartment in London with my two poker friends, Charlie and Sam.

Whilst in the midst of apartment hunting, I was crashing over at Charlie’s house. At the end of every day, he would inform me of his poker results and recount endless tales of the plentiful donations he had received from recreational players in the Victoria Casino.

“How did he win so much?” I thought. Charlie, by my standards, was a terrible poker player, but he was earning a pretty penny for himself. Yet here I was, grinding my soul away, trying to earn a monthly salary that Charlie could earn in a single day. 

After hearing for months how Charlie had won so much, one morning on a packed train from Amersham to London Marylebone, a few thoughts appeared in my head… Is this it? Is this the rest of my life?? I’m six months in but have 40 more years to go, how the hell am I going to make it through this? 

The young professional city boy lifestyle grated on my soul. Waking up early, deciding what to wear, running for the train, slotting yourself into a packed carriage like tinned sardines, entering the office, hitting targets, handling a micro-manging manager, drinking a million cups of coffee to keep you alive enough to get you through the clicks and taps of spreadsheets and graphs, counting down the seconds till home time, more rush hour commute, too tired to cook, too tired to eat, too tired to do anything. The same grind, five days a week, on repeat, while doing all you can to make it to the weekend.  

I couldn’t take it anymore. This idea of building a career didn’t seem worth it if the price I had to pay was a slow, drawn-out death of my sanity. Plus, my parents did okay for themselves in the world of business, so why did I have to have a fancy corporate job? If acquiring lots of money to live the life I wanted, there were other ways about it. 

I handed in my notice and went back to the world of poker. I told myself, “If someone like Charlie could do it, I could do it too.”

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It’s obviously not the best way to think, but I still thought it. 

I can sit here and give you a spiel about how everyone is on their own path, envy is toxic, it’s unhealthy to compare yourself to others, compare yourself to who you were yesterday and so on. But as much as I  believe in these pithy platitudes, human emotions is very complex. Envy is a very real emotion, and I’ve spent a lot of time trying to grapple with why it exists, what evolutionary advantage it serves and why Cain and Abel – a lesson on envy – is the first story told after the Garden of Eden in the Old Testament. I bring this up because I’ve come to realise that the Old Testament contains an interesting collection of human nature, but I digress.

No matter how hard I try, there’s still a part of me that feels the compulsion to compare myself to others. Even at 31, I can’t help but feel like I’m ‘behind’ on life, and I need to run twice as fast to catch up. 

I had spent the last year chastising myself for these thoughts whenever they crept up. However, recently, I’ve come to accept that we’re all imperfect, complex human beings that don’t always have the purest motivations. This isn’t to justify a demeaning and vain mindset. But an acceptance that, sometimes, we compare ourselves and do whatever we can to move forward. 

I often see this in men. There’s a certain sense of masculinity that men like to compete with each other. I first witnessed this at my high school. I went to an all-boys school, and you could smell the ultra competitiveness in the atmosphere. We’d try and one-up each other, either physically or academically, insult and fight one another and still be friends the next day. 

Grown men do this too, just in more respectable ways. Occasionally, when I went to the gym with friends, we’d tell each other how tired we were and we were going to take it easy. But the moment we stepped foot in the gym, something strange would happen and we tried to outlift each other. Ego lifting at its finest. 

I saw this pattern repeat itself in a lot of the new things I took up. I would be extremely motivated to outwork and outstudy my peers to prove myself. My desire to become better at anything is partially motivated by the fact that I’m terrible compared to the rest of the group, but I want to get better. 

At the end of the day, we’re not angels. As much as we try to be, most of our actions are not motivated by purity and virtue. 

Through journaling and meditation, I’ve become more observant of my thoughts. A lot of those thoughts are terrible and hurtful if said out loud. Of course, everything I say goes through a filter to be polite and respectable.

You could argue it’s disingenuous of me not to say what I think, but sometimes I do think the people would be worse off if I did say everything I thought. For instance, in poker, whenever a friend had a good session, I’d think, “fuck sake, that should’ve been me because I’m better.” But because that would leave me with no friends, I congratulated them on their success and moved on. In my experience, it’s possible to experience envy but be happy for someone, they’re not mutually exclusive. I can feel jealous and take joy in my friend's success. It’s a normal and healthy human thing to experience both at the same time. 

Meditation has shown me that I can’t control a lot of what I think. They just appear in my head. But I can control what I say and how I treat others. 

Getting motivated by the wrong things is similar. It’s a form of not always having the best thoughts, but we filter those motivations into more refined speech and expressions. 

I suspect every adult, like me, thinks prideful, vain and arrogant thoughts, but they also don’t say everything they think for the sake of themselves and others. 

Being human is to be a walking, talking, breathing lump of cognitive dissonance. We hold on to whatever we can to get us to move forward, whether it’s a healthy or unhealthy thought. There’s nothing inherently right or wrong with our thoughts because it’s hard to control them. But we can control what we do. 

Comparing myself to Tom, Dick, or Harry may just be a way to push myself to the boundaries of what I am capable of. Trying to get to the same level as my peers is fun. They’re normal people that I deem comparable and accessible. Some people are in my league, and some aren’t. Is it rational? Nope. But it’s a belief that gets me to take action towards the best version of myself. 

It’s okay not to be the embodiment of meaning and virtue. That doesn’t mean I’m saying you have the license to be a shit person. It means you have the license to live a bit and be human.

— Jason Vu Nguyen