ABSTRACT
In this chapter I share my perceptions for how mid-career individuals might best sustain their motivation over the course of their time in academia as their interests and responsibilities shift. I treat motivation from a behavior analytic perspective, where behavior in a given context is influenced by motivating operations that affect the value of behavioral consequences and the probability of specific contextually controlled behaviors. I also emphasize the role of values as verbal motivating operations that establish the influence of powerful reinforcers via verbal rules, and as a result occasion behavior that may be consistent with those values. Finally, I consider how important experiences inside and outside of one’s work can affect one’s motivation in all of the interconnected contexts of one’s life.
