What gets me eager to get to work?

Problem solving and creating something. Or maybe it's problem solving as a creative process. Problem solving, at least the way that I go about doing it, requires knowing how all the various pieces are connected, what are they doing, why are things arranged in this way and not in a different order. Diving into a murky situation and figuring out what's really going on so I can see order where others see chaos. It's not knowing one thing really well, but knowing enough about a lot of things to see how they relate to one another and how to use those connections to fix a broken piece. 

That's my Big Project. That's the common thread that links all the activities that I find easy to pursue. This blog, my side projects at work, reading connect because they give me a chance to work on a problem and express my understanding in these blog entries, a presentation at a technical meeting, or some other entity that I can send out into the world. Even working on different aspects of the my personal life became much easier when I accepted the truth of the situation and started really digging into my behavior and what was driving me to do things that kept hurting my wife. It became a problem to be solved. 

My bouncing from topic to topic is essential for who I interact and deal with the world. I was fortunate to find a subject, chemistry, that allowed me to go deep while getting a graduate degree, but is relevant to so many different technical problems that I could pursue my penchant to flit from subject to subject as my interests jump from problem to problem. I can't pick some pick out there goal to work on because I'm motivated by solving problems. That's not entirely true. I want to figure out the best way to lead an R&D group and have that group interact effectively with the non-technical functions in the business. That's the problem that fuels my MBA studies. It's not career progression. It's figuring out how my R&D activities fit into the context of the company.