Sunir endured extreme difficulty early on. He was raised in Nepal by his grandparents, who died when he was six. He moved in with his aunt, who died a decade later. The last thing she told him was to never leave the country. Within a week, he was headed to the Bay because Zero to One was his favorite book. Arriving with $700 and no connections, Sunir slept on a driveway for three months, lived off Trader Joe's 20¢ bananas for longer, and traded weekend sleep for 48-hour shifts to afford rent. He eventually started a business, and then two others, to gain more stability.

Sunir has helped me think through motivation. So has my mom. Growing up, she was known for repeating things. Repetition was her pedagogy – and a testament to lots of patience. One concept was "p-squared." Passion and persistence. The idea is that strategy, skill, and luck are not enough. To achieve anything of consequence, we need motivation.

But motivation can be amorphous. Often inherent or internalized, it's hard to pinpoint. So I wanted to explore motivation more deeply, better understanding its most real and optimal form.

When I asked Sunir what he would do if his current company didn't work, he said without hesitation: I'd start another company solving the exact same problem. He "wills the universe to orient itself [around him]" his roommate says.

To understand motivation, Sunir likes this question: "What would you be thinking about if you knew you were going to die in the next four hours?"

I think this framing is directionally correct but not perfect. Discrete time is a powerful motivator. Because tasks expand to fill the allotted time, as Parkinson posits, four hours creates extreme urgency and motivation to act. The framing is also helpful because fear and trembling is a reliable forcing function to find purpose. Death reminds us that there are certain things we must do. That history has its eyes on us. When my flight attendant announced recently, "we're having an emergency landing in seven minutes, get into brace position," I thought along similar lines. What would I do if I had another shot at life?

But death is too limiting. And four hours is too short-term. Consequential projects are not achieved in tiny timeframes. We need expansiveness. Operating from a place of fear limits upside. We dream bigger from a place of abundance. Bill Gates puts this succinctly: "Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years."

I've found that Jewish tradition offers interesting perspectives on motivation. It forces us to ask two dialectical questions each week. On Shabbat, we're asked to imagine a "redeemed" world. Otherwise, we're asked to build it.

Shabbat commemorates the creation of the world and our exodus from slavery. So we are commanded to feel content and redeemed, to cease from labor, to "taste of the world to come." We are asked to spend one day with feelings of complete freedom and gratitude and sufficiency. This is what Abraham Joshua Heschel means when he writes, "unless one learns how to relish the taste of Sabbath…one will be unable to enjoy the taste of eternity in the world to come."

The week celebrates work. Just as we are commanded to rest, we are commanded to work. "Six days you shall labor and do all your work." We have six days to do all of our work. That's it. That's all our time. This creates an almost endless striving that moves the ancient Rabbis to conclude: Rest is for the World to Come. Or, as Bon Jovi says, "I'll sleep when I'm dead." How do we spend our six working days? To earn a weekly taste of redemption. To build the world in Shabbat's image, creating heaven on earth.

These views represent a benevolent perspective on human motivation, where people internalize theories of "the good life" and act accordingly. But then again, more raw motivation exists too. "Were it not for the evil inclination, no one would build a house, marry, beget children, or engage in business," the Sages contend. Motivation can be a psychological response to unmet internal needs...to survive, to prove, to win, to outcompete, to achieve glory, to carry that chip on your shoulder. These primal motivations move us, just like the theoretical frameworks we internalize.

Perhaps we strive for some balance between the two. And maybe that's what "p-squared" teaches, and why grit-researcher Angela Duckworth argues for the power of "passion and perseverance for especially long-term goals." Ultimately motivation just needs to endure, like an infinite game, never fully satiating but nourishing us all along.

Additions from people I admire

Amy Rockford, founder of Axo Neurotech:

"[T]rue founder motivation isn't tied to a particular company or outcome, but to the inevitability of solving a problem. That framing mirrors how I experience my own drive. Where or how I solve it matters far less than the fact that I have to. It's less a choice than an obsession, something I can't switch off.

At the same time, I felt the tension you describe between urgency and expansiveness. For me, urgency is very real. As an immigrant in the U.S. and a new mum, time feels unusually precious. There's a constant assessment running in the background: am I tackling this with the right intensity, the right velocity, the right focus? Not out of fear, but out of a refusal to waste time.

That's why Sunir's answer resonated so strongly. Failure isn't really an option when the alternative is simply starting again on the same problem. In recent months, many people have asked me how I knew I was "ready" to start a company, or whether the timing was right. The honest answer is that I reached a point where not doing it felt like the greater risk, a misuse of time. So I quit a stable job, while pregnant, to build something I've been carrying for over a decade, without hesitation.

...Motivation that endures isn't purely fear driven or purely idealistic. It's sustained by a kind of inevitability, an infinite game mindset, where the work itself becomes the constant, and the form it takes can change."

Storied VC I admire:

"It starts with negative drive. It's about survival. We don't want to be outrun by friends. But at some point, you go beyond survival, have a lot of freedom, then [generate a] positive drive...That negative drive that creates so much success has to turn into some positive drive. Doing it for the sake of doing it because you love it. It gives you joy, makes you alive, creating positivity and positive sum, doing something for the world that fulfills you.

Negative drives get you straight As, the first $10-100MM. But that's not what's going to sustain something that goes way beyond. [Starting off] Jobs had a negative drive, and turned it into a positive drive...[such that he ultimately] worked in his hospital bed."