Motivation appears in numbers, but begins inside people. It sounds obvious, until we try to understand it. I am currently doing my PhD, with motivation as my research topic. During this journey, I came across two philosophical papers that changed how I think about motivation as a human experience. I did not read them to debate philosophy or to prove anything right or wrong, but to reflect on how much we can really know about what drives people.
One of these papers was written in 1974 by Thomas Nagel. He asks a simple question: What is it like to be a bat? Bats experience the world through echolocation. Science explains how this works, yet even with all this knowledge, we still do not know what it feels like to be a bat. That experience cannot be accessed from the outside. It has to be lived.
A similar idea appears in a later paper by Frank Jackson, often explained through the thought experiment known as Mary's Room. Mary knows every scientific fact about color but has never seen color herself. When she finally does, she gains experience, not new facts. The gap between knowing and experiencing becomes clear.
What stood out to me was a simple pattern. Some human states cannot be fully understood from the outside. They can be studied and described, but they are ultimately lived. Motivation fits this pattern very clearly. We often treat motivation as something visible. We read it from actions, effort, outcomes, or scores. But motivation begins inside a person. It can feel like hope, curiosity, fear, pressure, meaning, or conflict. Two people can behave in similar ways while experiencing motivation very differently. We also struggle to understand our own motivation, often noticing it only when it changes or fades. This suggests that motivation is not just something we explain or track, but something we experience over time.
In the same way that we cannot know what it is like to be a bat, we cannot fully experience another person's motivation. We can listen, observe, ask questions, and build explanations, but there will always be a gap between what we see and what someone feels.
At work, this matters. Different people experience the same environment very differently. The same feedback or pressure can feel motivating to one person and overwhelming to another. A leader cannot fully experience what each person is going through. What a leader can do is recognize this limit and respond with empathy. Not empathy as fully understanding what someone feels, but empathy as listening, being aware that experiences differ, and taking care in how decisions are made.
For me, these papers did not explain motivation. They helped me slow down and rethink how I approach it. Motivation cannot be fully borrowed or observed from the outside. It has to be lived. Keeping this in mind may not give us quick answers, but it can help us listen more carefully, judge less quickly, and respond more thoughtfully to the people around us.