Learning Requires Motivation

You won't get good at anything you don't like to do. You have to have passion to become good at something. To become good at something, you have to be willing to do it over and over, to spend hours and hours doing it.

This makes it unlikely too many people are going to become great writers. Or even good writers. But even without passion, people can become better writers. It is a skill like any other skill. And with the proper motivation, you can gain writing skills. To become as good as Shakespeare, that motivation must be entirely internal, but to become merely competent, an external motivation is sufficient.

If you want your employees to become better writers, you have to decide what will best motivate them to do so. It has to be measureable. Simply telling them they have to sign up for a course or a seminar -- whether external or internal to the company -- will never be enough to get results. One does not learn anything by simply being present when someone is talking about something. To learn, you have to be actively present, mentally present. No one can teach -- not even the greatest teachers of all time -- if students are not interested in learning the material.

What is going to be their motivation to learn it? What can you provide?