Narrowing it down further2

After some talk with Jesvin and peers, there's a little drift in my objectives:

What are you going to do?

1. To investigate and understand how the encouragement of striving one’s best push or even dampen one’s capabilities to achieve.

2. Find out what motivates people.

After all these talk of how words of encouragement such as "jiayou" or "ganbatte" can maybe help in spurring a person to work harder or to do their best, most of the reactions I've got for this was no, it doesn't help much. Or it depends on who is the person saying these. Upon talking further, the question of "What motivates you then" came up. I think I may have just discovered my sole main purpose why I was curious about this topic.

In the meantime, the whole of last week I was reading articles, journals on why people do their best or what affects people to do their best. One of the articles that I came across was Kenneth Burke's "Definition of Man", here are some of the excerpts that I thought can relate to my topic:

“Man is ... rotten with perfection”

“Destiny Compulsion” - to bring out the thought that the sufferer unconsciously strives to form his destiny in accordance with this “striving for perfection” pattern.
the sufferer exerts almost superhuman efforts in the attempt to give his life a certain form.

What more illustrations could one want, of a drive to make one’s life perfect, despite the fact that such efforts at perfection might cause the unconscious striver great suffering?

From Kenneth Burke, “Definition of Man” in Language as Symbolic Action.

In the article it is said that it's is man's nature to strive for perfection and that perfection can mean in the simple sense of an author wanting to get his book published and so on. I thought it was interesting how it could apply to almost anything perhaps? As long as one has the drive and desire to achieve something be it from eating the most delicious ice-cream or have a happy marriage with 2 children or things like that. Each individual should have their own idea of "perfection" or rather the ideal life I believe.

But then again, perhaps having this thought of the ideal and working towards it can be two different things, depending how hard of a goal this ideal is. If it's just "I want to eat a banana", this thought can be easily fulfilled by going to the mart and buy one. But if it's something like "I want to be an astronaut", how much will one person go to achieve a "perfection" like that or forever just having it as a thought.

Hmm hope I'm on the right track.