It’s February. Why get out of bed?

It’s a threadbare story by now but leadership gurus still drool over it. When JFK visited Cape Canaveral in 1962, a year after committing America “to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth,” he stopped to talk to a man who was sweeping the floor. He asked something like “what are you doing?”

“Putting a man on the moon, sir.”

Kennedy’s ambition had resonated up and down and across a 400,000-person organization and everyone was feeding off it. Good for him. He’d managed to get everyone jazzed by the coolest project of the 20th century, with a budget of $25 billion, where any day you might shoot the shit with the President of the United States while you scraped chewing gum off polished concrete. Motivation’s usually harder than that.

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Early on I worked for a senior leader as a gopher on his pet projects. He was a generous mentor who gave me this advice. Take the time, he said, to understand why the people you work with come in every day. Some are there to climb the ladder and make a name for themselves, some to learn and grow, some just love the work, and others—many—are there to feed the family and get home in time to pick up the kids. You can’t motivate without knowing the why, one approach won’t fit all, and motivations change—sometimes you’re running through walls for your teammates and sometimes there’s just so much else going on in your life that it’s all about hanging on. Start by understanding why you show up.

It’s often hard to know, honestly, but when a new opportunity takes your fancy, it’s a chance to ask a question a later manager introduced me to. Do you want to get the job or do the job? Meaning: is this about the title, a cool company, a bump in compensation, or a way out—which probably means your motivation will start dropping off day two when it’s your new normal—or are you passionate about doing the work this new job demands?

It’s hard enough getting at your own motivation, let alone others’. And some really don’t want you to know theirs.

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In the 2010s, Abdirizak Jaji Raghe Wehelie wanted to do the job. Wanted to do this one particular job desperately. In fact, no one else could do this job the way he needed it be done. He was an FBI interpreter, fluent in English and Arabic, and it was his job to translate intercepted calls and give a verbatim account to agents and prosecutors so they could bring wiretapped wrongdoers to justice. If anyone had to interpret these calls, some of which set his heart racing, it should be him. He was motivated to do the job. He just wasn’t motivated to do it right.

In 2019, Wehelie appeared in court accused of intentionally mistranslating intercepts and misidentifying callers, including a voicemail a suspect (Person A) had left for Person B. Wehelie was Person B. Investigators discovered 179 calls or messages between the two over seven years. (Then and now, if your ‘why’ being disclosed publicly would make life difficult, get a new why.)

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If we can't know for sure why someone else is showing up, it’s still worth examining why we do. So, ask yourself. Do I want to get the job or do the job? Am I heading towards something or as far as possible away from something? Do I have a choice right now or is this the time to hunker down and grind it out?

Is my motivation strong enough to get me out of the door 1,000 workdays on the bounce?

And, if not this, then what?