This is so foreign to the way I think. Admiration is secondary, or actually, it's like at the bottom of the list. I mean, it's there sometimes - but it's nowhere near a driving force. As a matter of fact, I usually prefer to live life under the radar and do things anonymously.
This was a very helpful post.
Motivations are kind of interesting. Most of us want the same basic things, like fulfillment, but different varieties of motivations lead to fulfillment for different people. While a 7 may want freedom so that they can experience things and enjoy themselves, just experiencing things is rarely enough for me because I have a need for everything to mean something. It's not that I devalue experiential pleasure, I just come from a different perspective. I want everything to be meaningful, profound, novel, and creative. If what I'm not doing is not one of those things according to my own standards (I left out a few things), then I just feel like I'm wasting my time. There's no strict criteria for whether I'm doing those things or not, and it's subjective of course, so sitting there thinking seems like a very worthwhile thing to do most of the time because I'm working on something "big" in my head.
I often see my life from above. As if the real me is up in the sky looking down on the masterpiece that I'm creating. Things that other people care a lot about barely mean anything to me. One of my biggest problems from the past was always placing too much importance on the magnificence of what I was doing instead of the practicality of it. Well, I still do it, but not as much. If my life was a novel, I'm the author, main character, and the readership. Yes, even when nobody is around and I never plan on telling anybody about what I'm doing, I'm still my own audience. I experience myself and my idea of my life from many different angles. I'm never just me looking out, and I've always wondered if other people are actually like that. This may sound weird, but it's more simple than it seems. My imagination entertains me and inspires me, I enjoy the ride, and I have a strong desire to have a positive impact on others. I want to create profound magnificence, I want to experience it, and I want to share it. I want to show people what's possible.
I've always wanted to be the hero, the light-bringer, the sage, the creator, the scientist, or the philosopher. Someone who makes a profound difference in a unique way. I still want to be other things, but I want to be those other things because they can add to my life experience. I want to be those first things because they are among my biggest and most defining motivations.
But it's not so strange, because it all ties together. I think anybody's outlook on life would seem strange from the outside, because it's impossible to explain everything and words can be taken in many different ways. Plus, we're viewing everything through our own subjective lenses. In most significant ways, we all have a lot in common. Here's an example so that my viewpoint seems easier to relate to.
If we played music together and then went out dancing, we'd both probably look like we were having the same experience on the outside. While jamming, we'd both be enjoying ourselves equally, but I'd be thinking about what I'm learning from the experience about music theory that I could later use to produce something amazing or teach to other people, I'd be trying to remember the things that I played that I liked the most so that I could later use it for a song, and I'd be thinking about all kinds of other things. I might even think about how we could record a song together that everybody will love to hear 20 years from now. Often, thinking, learning, experimenting, and experiencing are same thing for me, so it's not like you'd think I was distracted. I'd probably be talking the whole time and having tons of fun.
While dancing, I'd probably be a little awkward at first, and then I'd somehow find myself having all the attention of the dance floor and really going at it in some crazy way that is completely ridiculous but fun and inspiring. The whole time I'd be having a blast, but I'd also be thinking about brilliant lines that I could write in a book some day about conquering fear or whatever other thing I'd think that I was learning about at the time. This thinking never really stops. (And I always enjoy it.) The downside is that when it turns negative it's just as powerful, but in a destructive way. I still kind of enjoy it then, too, because every thought I have seems like a cosmic brush-stroke on the masterpiece of my life, no matter how messed up it is. A novel's magnificence is not measured by how happy the characters in it were.
I understand that wanting to be, create, and spread greatness is a lot different than actually doing it. No delusions there. I'm not there yet, at least not in the way that I want to be. If the main character in the novel is suffering, it's okay, because the author and readership are still having a great time. So believe me, I'm not trying to take any credit for anything that I haven't actually accomplished, this is just the way that I think.
In short, I'm grandiose. Aspirations of grandeur rather than delusions of grandeur.
