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Thursday, March 28
The Indiana Daily Student

Why do we do what we do

Motivation

Gym rats, workaholics, couch potatoes, and over-achievers — label them how you will, we all know a few.

Motivation is a matter of rewards and punishments, says professor Preston Garraghty, who teaches a class called the Psychology of Motivation. People seek to maximize pleasure and minimize pain, he says.

“If a student comes into my office and says ‘I studied for five hours and still did poorly on the exam,’ in their eyes they were punished,” he says. “Their effort later on may go down.”

Garraghty calls on the most basic biological motivations. If a person is hungry, they will eat. Similarly, if a person wants a degree from IU, they must recognize the goal and how they will reach it. Whether or not they stay on track depends on how much they value the goal.

“I think kids get their aspirations largely from their parents, a little from their peers, and some from their teachers,” he says. “Ultimately, if parents don’t instill in their children a value of education, they’re not going to value it.”

Garraghty stresses that there is no clear explanation for an individual’s motivation. Yet one thing is for sure, something drives us all.

Jen Peterson
Keeping busy is second nature for junior Jen Peterson.

On top of a full course load, she has managed to work between 40 and 50 hours a week. She works between 15 and 25 hours a week at Pitaya on Kirkwood Avenue.
She took a break from her waitressing job at Puccini’s La Dolce Vita, where she worked about 20 hours a week, and replaced it with the iUnity campaign.

With all of these obligations, she still finds time to be an active member of Alpha Gamma Delta.

Peterson does not have to work to have money. Her parents support her financially, but she says she wants “to be able to prove to my family that I know the value of a dollar.”    
When she was jobless for one month during the summer, her parents told her not to worry about finding a new one. But Peterson says she needed to do something. And that’s when she decided one job would not suffice and decided to work two.

With all her earnings, Peterson jokes that she puts it into the Kilroy’s fund. She says she likes being able to do something without asking her parents for help.
 
“It’s nice to know that if I needed to support myself, I could,” Peterson says. “It gives me more freedom and I am able to claim independence.”

Brian Bollinger
Many students cringe at the thought of math equations and graphs, but junior Brian Bollinger jumps at the opportunity to play with numbers.

Bollinger saw an opportunity to create a new organization, the Kelley Portfolio Management Club, at the Kelley School of Business.

Members invest real money into the stock market. At meetings, members pitch their ideas in groups in hopes of carrying them out, but they don’t always work.

Bollinger worked on a start-up Web-based company, but after working hundreds of unpaid hours this summer, the Web site fell through. This taste of failure spurred him forward.

“If you are just going to give up after doing something wrong the first time, then there really is no hope for you,” he says. “It’s learning through those mistakes in order to excel to the next level.”

Kyle Swinford
Junior Kyle Swinford is not on an athletic team. He is not training for a weight-lifting competition or a marathon. In fact, he has trouble thinking of short-term goals that push him to exercise regularly. He’s more of a long-term guy, just hoping to look good and stay healthy.

That’s why he spends 12-13 hours a week pumping iron and working up a sweat at the gym.

“When you strip everything away — all your distractions, school, family — all you really have is yourself, your body,” Swinford says. “The longer you take care of your body, the longer you’ll live.”

For Swinford, it’s a simple matter of prioritizing. Working out comes before school and sleep in his mind.

“I simply derive my motivation from doing the right thing,” he says. “To stay in shape. To eat right. To help my fellow man. I want to look back on my life and be proud of the things I did and the things I accomplished.”

Sam Spaiser
You won’t see junior Sam Spaiser chowing on Pizza X at 3 a.m.

He is on a low-fat raw vegan diet. Spaiser eats about 3,000 calories a day, which consist of sweet fruits and leafy greens.

Spaiser says he chose this lifestyle because he wanted to be at his optimal health.
“I didn’t want to survive,” he says, “I wanted to thrive.”

He also exercises at least one hour a day by doing gymnastics or training in the park when the weather is nice.

He tries to do some sort of physical activity before he eats because he says humans should work for their food.

“When chimpanzees want to eat, they go get it.”

Spaiser says that eating this way is easy to do. Sometimes he’ll eat 30 bananas in a day.

But typically Spaiser varies his diet. He says there are about 150 fruits out there and he says he has “never eaten so many different types of foods” prior to this diet.

Spaiser is passionate about living a healthy lifestyle. His degree is called “An Evolutionary Perspective on Human Diet” through the Individualized Major Program. He is researching anatomical reasons for why certain foods are better for humans than others.

This past summer he lived on a self-sustainable community in Hawaii and interned on a farm.

“When you get rid of all of the distractions, you can enjoy and see things you might look past,” he says. “It’s like no strings attached. Everyone deserved to live care-free for at least a month.”

Spaiser’s grocery receipt
10 heads of organic lettuce
30 lbs. bananas
38 lbs. red navel oranges

Typical meal 1:
1 to 2 lbs. dates (preferably moist barhis from the Date People)
2 cucumbers (sliced, with a date placed on each slice)

Typical meal 2:
15 to 20 oranges or tangelos (juiced)
4 to 5 oranges or tangelos (juiced) blended with a few leafs of romaine lettuce
romaine lettuce chopped into a bowl with a dressing of 1 to 2 juiced oranges or tangelos blended with 3 ounces avocado

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