Health seems sweetest after sickness, food in hunger, goodness in the wake of evil, and at the end of daylong labor, sleep. I don't think Heraclitus wants us to play any silly games with ourselves. But I do see two pieces of wise advice in the area here. First, Heraclitus can remind us that failure, problems, dissapointments, and loss can indeed motivate us. That's the silver lining to an otherwise dark cloud that all of us face now and then.
Contrast enhances our experience and our appreciation of the good things in our lives.
It also goads us on to new behavior. Secondly, without doing anything silly or artificial to create scarcity for the sake of motivation, we can all nonetheless use our creativity to spot new needs in our businesses, our communities, and our lives. Coming to appreciate in a new way a real scarcity that is creating a problem, we are newly motivated to marshal our energies for action. But there is also another sort of motivational problem Heraclitus addresses. But sometimes the spirit needs a little help too.