It’s one of the oldest jokes in the book. A self-important actor, preparing for his next scene, asks his impatient director, “What’s my motivation?”

“Your paycheck!” sneers the director

When actors prepare to take on roles, they spend a lot of time thinking about what motivates their characters. They think about their characters’ objectives or goals, the obstacles that thwart those objectives or goals, and the tactics and strategies they’ll employ for achieving them. Hamlet’s objective is to seek revenge for his father’s murder by his uncle. His excessive deliberation is the obstacle that prevents him from carrying out his revenge. The tactic he employs is to pretend to be insane to throw his enemies off guard and amass incriminating evidence against his uncle. The stakes could not be higher. Hamlet’s entire reason for being rests, in his mind, on the fulfillment of his objective.

Consider, for a moment, The Pledge of Allegiance – content that most of us know by heart. Now imagine it recited by three different people: a bored fifth grader in a school assembly, a foreign dissident who has finally achieved citizenship in the U.S., and the mother of a soldier killed in action. The content is the same; the motivation, the performance — and the meaning — entirely different.

So what’s your motivation? Here’s a hint:

It’s not your paycheck.

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