Mojo - Nature Or Nurture?

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Mojo  - Nature Or Nurture?



Is it possible to improve your mojo? In this post, I will explore the extent to which you can or cannot develop more mojo Each component is different. Some are inherent and some are learned. Let’s start with listing the components as I see them.

  • Motivation
  • Experience
  • Expertise
  • Faith
  • Support
  • Luck
  • Willingness to act.
This earlier post described these seven components of mojo. This is my own model. There are others, but I like this one. Consider them one at a time.


Motivation is either internal or external, as I have said here. External motivation can obviously be acquired and isn’t due to nature. It sometimes is converted to internal motivation. However, having a supply of internal motivation that comes without conversion is mostly from nature, not nurture. In other words, it is part of your makeup. Consequently, it is not productive to try to increase your inherent internal motivation, but rather to work on the conversion process and rely on external motivation where it is necessary.

Next, consider experience. This is something that you get with time and isn’t inherent at all. Consequently, I consider it due to nurture. Expertise is similar, although the time frame for acquiring it may vary by person. I have asserted in the past that even a very young person may have acquired a surprising amount of expertise. So a person’s ability to acquire expertise may be due to nature, but it will still take some nurture to get it.

Faith can be either from nature or nurture. In other words, you are born with the proclivity to have some amount of faith, but you can increase the amount. Unless you naturally have enough faith to suit you, it may be productive toward your mojo to work on increasing it.

Support is trickier to describe. To a certain extent, you cannot choose who supports you in childhood. 
You are dependent on nature or others to provide your support. However, as you age, you have more say in who to rely on, have faith in, and trust. You can work on this, but you are still limited by your natural ability to go with your supporters’ opinions.

Luck, as I see it, is not something you can change. It is not predictive to try. Think of it as natural. It may change as you age, but I think of it as something that only changes in a random way, not in a way that you can alter.

Lastly, willingness to act is a character trait. Many have tried in vain to improve it, thinking that nurture is involved. It isn’t. Nature either gave you the willingness or it didn’t.

To summarize, it is possible to increase your mojo by working on your external motivation, expertise, and experience. It isn’t productive to work on internal motivation, past support, luck, faithfulness or willingness to act. However, it is possible to improve on current support or your degree of faith, as well as for external motivation to be converted to internal motivation.

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