Motivation is the more assertive cousin of willingness, and the emotional component of assertiveness. While the willing person will act if necessary, the motivated person seeks to act.
Real
True Narratives
- Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (Simon & Schuster, 2018): a “rousing look at the political uses of this supposedly unfeminine emotion”.
- Jenny Boully, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life (Coffee House Press, 2018): “Boully addresses the impulse to write”.
Imaginary
Film and Stage
- Chariots of Fire, about two Olympic athletes with disparate motivations to succeed
- Fitzcarraldo, about an “obsessed impresario . . . whose foremost desire in life is to bring both Enrico Caruso and an opera house to the deepest jungles of South America”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
John Coltrane's hard-driving bop and post-bop jazz:
- “Blue Train” album
- “Giant Steps” album
- “John Coltrane with the Red Garland Trio” album (1958)
- “A Love Supreme” album (1965)
- “Crescent” album (1964)
- “Black Pearls” album (1964)
- “Meditations” album (1966)
- “Live in Japan” (1966)
- “Expression” album (1967)
- “Afro Blue Impressions” album (1977)
- “Africa/Brass” abum
- “Ascension” album
- “The Believer” album
- “Stardust” album
- “Olé Coltrane” album
- “Ballads” album
- “Transitions” album
- “Coltrane ’58: The Prestige Recordings” box set
- “The Heavyweight Champion: The Complete Atlantic Recordings”
- “Live Trane: The European Tours” box set
- “The Complete 1961 Village Vanguard Recordings”
- “Blue World” album
- Live at The Jazz Gallery, New York City, 1960
- Live in Copenhagen, 1963
- Last performance at Newport, July 2, 1966
- On the making of “A Love Supreme”
George Adams was a champion of hard-driving, straight-ahead jazz.
- The George Adams – Don Pullen Quartet live at the Subway, 1986
- “Live at the Village Vanguard” album, Volume 2
Other albums:
- Peter Brötzmann, “PICA PICA”
- Noah Haidu, “Infinite Distances”
- Tom Harrell, “Infinity”
Poetry
Out of a cell into this darkened space—
The end at twenty-five!
My tongue could not speak what stirred within me,
And the village thought me a fool.
Yet at the start there was a clear vision,
A high and urgent purpose in my soul
Which drove me on trying to memorize
The Encyclopedia Britannica!
[Edgar Lee Masters, “Frank Drummer”]