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Motive versus the ultimate goal

William Liao
2 min readJan 9, 2025

Motive is the force that makes something happen. It’s the seemingly useful idea that pops into your head, it’s the request that a friend or colleague sends you.

The ultimate goal is the thing you really want to achieve that addresses your most important interests in a given context. In the context of work, a goal might be to produce a report because a colleague asked you to (motive), but the ultimate goal might be to grow your business which you expect your report to assist with.

Ideally these our motive and ultimate goals point us in the same direction, but sometimes they don’t.

You might be highly motivated to solve a problem for someone you respect and yet it can also be the case that putting all your energy towards this problem would be completely antithetical to achieving your ultimate goal of solving an entirely different problem.

To that end, a simple gut check often suffices when trying to figure out if where we’re spending our time makes sense: are my motive and ultimate goal pointing in the same direction?

Are the things I’m thinking of doing for one reason or another going to help me solve what I care about most in this context?

Not everything we think we should do, we should actually do. Not if we want to maintain our sanity and move efficiently towards what we value.

This framework helps you figure out the difference.

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William Liao
William Liao

Written by William Liao

Taiwanese American, daily blogger of ideas about impactful work in service of others, photographer (ephemera.photography)

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