Guilt as Motivation

The Thought

Did you notice, you now do the work you never wanted to do? Are you aware that you are constantly upgrading yourself towards doing things which you never liked? 

What threat does this system lies and how you can bypass this?

The guilt is defined as a cognitive or an emotional experience that occurs when a person realizes or believes—accurately or not—that he or she has violated a moral standard, and bears significant responsibility for that violation.
Since ages the people in power have realized this concept and have used it efficiently to ensure that the workers continue to push themselves towards generating more work, in turn more profits by constantly upgrading themselves and this is done by the power of guilt.

Lets see how this scheme is constructed.

1. The person in power will walk upto you and will whole heartedly introduce in front of everyone that you are now the head of the Project X. Or if you are in a College, they ensure that you are now The head of the students, or assignment leader.

2. Then instead of clearly telling you the expectations and outcome, will ask you to improvise and think upon the output and propose a report.

3. And the person in power is smart enough because he has figured out what exactly the output he looks for and has identified the key pitfalls. So he will continue to encourage you to do more task, improve it, till you cross the deadline of time and project stands at the verge of failure.

4. Since you were the head of the project, you are clearly the victim who had the whole responsibility to accomplish the results. Now you are the Guilty of the crime which you never did, but were made to do.

5. The time is right, the rod is hot, the person in Power hits the rod hard, by either of the two ways.
a. Bringing in the person whom you are not comfortable working with, and making him the head for the project.
b. Having a closed door meeting with you and giving you one last chance to prove your metal.

Voila. The work is done. Now all the person in power has to do is, to just Monitor your pressure and ensure that you are getting enough words of Wisdom and appreciation for work.
By this way, he takes all the benefits and praise, for getting one more project successful.
The important part is, either you grow or the New team leader, but for sure, The person in Power will grow.

How can you by pass this.

Simple, If you can define the outcome and objective better than the person in power can define, you are going to be the king. The person in power will always search for you, no matter where you are and what you do.
So next time, you are given the project, instead of telling yourself about the benefits this project will have for you, define the benefits that the person will have from your project and then define the outcome.

Remember if you don't know where you are going, you will reach somewhere, but not where someone else wanted to reach.