Why Motivation?

Ok, I know your first question: why another blog on personal development? I know a lot of great blogs or websites focusing on personal development. My favorite ones are www.stevepavlina.com, www.paulgraham.com, www.jamesray.com and others. I read regularly blogs about personal development and the main topics are: making money, loosing weight, starting your own startup, and I agree these are very important topics. Though I’m pretty sure we all stop at some point and ask ourselves: am I capable to start my own business? am I capable to improve my relationships? am I capable to become a manager into the company I work for? am I capable to change anything? am I capable to make the next step? or even worse: I cannot start a business, I will never be a manager because I don’t have the skills, I will always have lousy relationships, I will never be capable of doing this or doing that.

What is Motivation?

I see all day people complaining about how hard their life is, how they don’t make enough money, how they are caught inside a bad relationship, how they are stuck into a lousy job. What’s very interesting to me is that when you say: “Life is hard and nothing comes from thin air” everyone will agree. But if you say: “Life is easy and you can have everything you want”, people will start laughing.
Starting from childhood, we’ve been told that our life has already been decided, that we’re very small and we don’t have any power, that there’s something called Destiny and we have no control over it. So when we see a successful person we say “that’s a lucky person, and that s/he’s been destined to be successful”. Or we simply say “s/he’s got lucky”.
The only difference between that person and the ones still waiting is MINDSET. That person has found the MOTIVATION for what s/he’s doing. That person has started to write her/his own destiny.

The difference between those that do and those that talk about doing is MOTIVATION. Motivation is the engine that drives all the great things in our lives and without motivation nothing spectacular will ever happen.
Probably a rushed answer will be: money is the motivation for all this. Well…actually it’s not. Money is only a vehicle to whatever it is that we want. The motivation is different than that and it’s personal and might be different for each one of us.

How do I find the Motivation?

Allan Pease has made an interesting list about our primal motivations. Your motivation might be: Financial independence, Having your own business, More income, Traveling, Having more spare time, Personal development, Helping others, Meeting new people, Retirement, and so on. Your primal motivation might be on this list, or it might be something else. In order to find it, think about what drives you, what would you like to achieve if you didn’t have any constraints? do you want money? or do you want freedom? do you want to travel? do you want to sail? do you want to run your own business? do you want to be a manager? do you want to be a great technical person? do you want to have financial independence? What do you want? When you find the right answer you will know what is your primal motivation.

How do I use the Motivation?

There are two discussions here: motivating yourself for achieving a personal goal and motivating the ones around you for achieving a common goal.

Motivation is our engine, it’s our fuel and it’s our direction. If motivation is strong enough, the engine will not stop, the fuel will not finish and the direction will not change until we get where we want. It’s easy to understand this, and most people start on this path. But if and when they fail, most of them start thinking: “I knew I couldn’t do this”, “I knew there’s no reason to try”, “I knew I would fail”. Do you see the mindset here? This is a closed mindset, it’s the mindset that separates greatness from mediocrity. It’s the mindset that separates success from failure. Let’s take businesses for example. Do you think there are any successful businessmen who didn’t fail at some point? The number of failures is probably equal or even bigger than the number of successes. Though, how did these successful businessmen succeed? How could they, if they failed? Well, they never stopped. Their mindset was: “I will keep doing this until I succeed. I will never stop until I reach my goals”. And they didn’t. And sooner or later they achieved their goals. The MOTIVATION was strong enough, so the MINDSET was the right one.

If we expand that, we can think about motivating people around us. Let’s say I’m a manager in a successful company and I have a team working on a project. What’s my role as a manager? Do I have to keep pushing people around, keep stressing people with the deadlines, do I have to ask them day by day what are they doing? I think not. All these are effects not cause, they are effects of people not being motivated enough. Project management is all about creating the right cause, motivating people, it’s about creating the right environment, and if we create the cause of motivated people, the effect will be great deliveries and respected deadlines. I will come back on this subject in a later article, I just wanted to stress out the role of motivation inside teams.

That’s all for now on motivation. I will focus on motivation most of the time but I will also write about New types of businesses, New types of management, New types of startups.

What’s next?

My next articles will be:

Find the power to achieve your goals or WHY do people keep saying “I don’t have the power to change anything (at my job, in my business relations, in my personal relations)”.

Advertising Industry Crossroad - why not sharing the money with the consumers? After all, they are the ones clicking on the links or watching the adds, right? Share with them and you’ll achieve the main goal of advertising: people will stop ignoring the adds (text, video, pictures).

New type of management in the Adaptability Century

Motivation inside your company - creating the right environment for a productivity boost

Why some people excel and others don’t - mindset, believe in your own potential

All these articles and what comes after them, will focus on motivation and mindset. So stay tuned!