My motivation is knowing that I have an edge over the field in the average tournaments that I play and understanding that variance is part of the game. Sometimes the donks will win. Sometimes you will get AA all in against KK and lose. Sometimes you can play a whole tournament without getting a playable hand.
One of the most eye-opening things I saw was a site called primedope that will show you the likely win rates for your given game. You can plug in the average tournament stats like number of entries, pay out structure etc. and your ROI. Even relatively small field tournaments with an ROI of 30%, there is still a very real possibility of being down over 500 tournaments, which seems insane, but that is how brutal variance can be sometimes.
