By being a student at the college level I began to realize more and more just how important being motivated was. What I didn't fully understand was all of the reasons for motivation besides just wanting to do well and the different stimuli that can affect how motivated you are. After skimming through chapter 11 I began to understand these things a little more. The thing that caught my eye right away was that most drives, even though they seem pleasant or satisfactory, are actually unpleasant. To me this seemed counter intuitive because I see things that motivate me as being positive things. After thinking about it in depth I began to realize that many drives that motivate a person to do something really aren't good. They are unpleasant things but as the book states, "that satisfaction of them results in pleasure."
Along with realizing the most drives are negative I also read about the different stimuli that can affect motivation. The most common one was arousal. At first this didn't make much sense to me because I took it at its physical meaning and I didn't think that this affected my motivation for most things. As I kept reading I realized it is more of a mental arousal at doing a complicated task or something along those lines.
These two things really caught my eye but so did many other topics and ideas and I am really looking forward to learning more about the inter working of the mind.
I think that this explanation for motivation is how the concept of punishment was derived. When you experience something uncomfortable in your life, it motivates you to change something so as to alleviate that discomfort. So therefore, punishment is used to force extreme discomfort on a person so as to motivate them to no longer commit crimes. The whole thing is really interesting the more you get into it.