"Could you be the sum of the four people you spend the most time with?" Collingwood Media columnist Brodie Grundy asks - and answers - the question in his second piece published on collingwoodfc.com.au

"Could you be the sum of the four people you spend the most time with?"

Motivation is one of those ‘sexy’ in-vogue words. It is like keeping your floorboards clean living with a Border Collie and a Broomhead - easy to want, hard to get and rare to maintain.

As human beings, we have prospered and evolved due to reward-seeking behaviour. We have our little neurotransmitter friend dopamine to thank for that, validating worthwhile behaviour with a hi-5 to the reward centre of the brain, as to say “do that again!”

AFL footballers set a lot of goals but as we travel through our careers those goals change, as do our responses to them. If Collingwood won the premiership in 2018 our dopamine friend would be handing out not just a hi-5, but a standing ovation.

But when Luke Hodge won his fourth premiership with Hawthorn I suspect he felt very different, or experienced a different kind of fulfilment, to the time when he won his first.

That is because there is a problem with this goal-reward habit of ours. We inevitably develop a tolerance for the hi-5 hit. It can be that we need different or greater challenges before the brain supplies us with the satisfaction we seek.

When I played my first game of AFL football I felt thrilled, proud and a sense of great satisfaction to have achieved a long-term goal. The elation was immense but not in an ego-stroking kind of way. I was not a better person for playing my first AFL match but I did experience a raw, visceral feeling of accomplishment.



Brodie Grundy and Dane Swan leave the MCG after Grundy's debut in round 18, 2013.

Five years on and I don’t get that same feeling every time my name is read out on the team sheet. Why?

Well simply, our brains adapt and need different stimulation. I suspect this is a part of why champion players like Nick Riewoldt, years and years after their first successes, continue to play relentlessly and brilliantly well.

Dopamine funded hi-5s ceased long ago for guys like Nick. The greats set themselves for something extraordinary – the standing ovation. The ultimate.

Read Brodie Grundy's first article: How football can provide hope.

Which is where motivation comes in. The matrix of everyday life is challenge enough but it seems to me that any long march to great achievement requires unmistakeable, unwavering purpose. Yep, motivation.

Obviously, achieving long term goals such as sharing in a premiership is not easy. Or guaranteed. There will be setbacks, when dopamine’s hands are tied and laziness, the grim reaper of goals, comes calling. Dumb luck is in there somewhere, too.

Which is when I reckon our friends and the people who inspire us most become critical. When the brain has stopped dispensing dopamine hi-5s, we need the right people in our inner circle. At least, I do.

The times when I feel inspired and motivated are most often spent in the company of good people, people with energy and a zest for life. This can be with certain team-mates and football friends but just as often with people from other walks of life; artists, writers, photographers, musicians, chefs and academics to name a few.

For me, the right people help clear the mist that lies between me and my long term goals.

I am blessed to have a mate in my life who is a professional artist. A painter. He likes football but isn’t obsessed by it. I like art but it isn’t what I do for a living. He is older than me, doesn’t earn the money that a footballer can and has been educated in a different world, a creative world. I find myself listening intently to his thoughts on life and everything else. I am a participant in our conversations in a way that I am often not in others.



I like to think of our conversations as the intellectual friction that exists between fire sticks. The sparks that fly out of a good conversation are my motivation.

I once read we are the sum of the four people we spend the most time with. I wonder who Nick Riewoldt surrounded himself with, and kept closest, through his incredible 17 year AFL odyssey?

In all likelihood, as he has passed through the phases of his life in football, there has been more than one select group. I cannot imagine that any of them were anything less than inspiring and, one way or another, sources of motivation which helped move him from the thrill of playing his first match to the pride of playing his last.