I feel this is something important because a core motivation will be able to ground you when you feel yourself doubting your abilities, not getting the results you want or feeling like you’ve hit a dead-end. A core motivation to me is a solid and firm purpose to create that is something you hold near and dear to your heart in my opinion. Therefore, in order to find it, you must analyze the reason why you create content and be as brutally honest with yourself as possible.

I will say that I failed to find this core motivation for quite some time in my previous pursuits on youtube for instance. When I was younger I only cared about getting views and becoming popular because I wanted to become some kind of youtube hit. So, while I had some creative thoughts, the minute my channel/videos didn’t perform as well as I’d hope to be, it sucked the life out of me since I was aware that my heart wasn’t in the right place when making my prior content. (For reference, I used to try to make a lot of AMV’s/anime crack’s back when they were super popular.)

However, as I’ve gotten older, I really stopped caring once I took time to meditate on the reasons why I created. Everyone has a surface level motive, but you have to spend time thinking and being one with yourself and your thoughts to uncover that heart behind your content. And I feel what went deeper beyond that surface level motivation was the fact I did actually enjoy the process of creating something.

To be able to mold or edit something into existence that has your own twist and turns into it, and then have other people actually like the content you produce is a wonderful feeling. Thus, to me, I see no reason in having that be a core motivation because at this point I don’t really give two halves of a shit how big or small my audience is. The main thing I care about is that feeling of knowing somewhere out in the world the feelings and emotions I’ve poured into my music are having an effect and that I’ve more or less touched the globe with something I’ve influenced.

With that said, I’ve made around 300 videos at this point and I honestly feel if it was just for views or some half-assed motivation like that, well, I would have burnt out a long time ago quite frankly. So, to conclude, if you want to have longevity in any of your creative pursuits, you need to have a motivation that will guide you through good and bad times. For me? That’s knowing my music has a positive influence on someone’s life, learning more to perfect my craft like a video game and the feeling of knowing my heart is out there somewhere in the world. For you? That might be something different and you’ll need to begin meditating on that.

I’d ultimately suggest outlining many of the different feelings you get while writing and create a chart of them to see which feeling is the most consistent and use that as your core motivation if nothing else.