The evolution of what motivates...

I recently set up my new workspace and decided to unpack some boxes I had labelled office eight years ago — long enough to be as much different as I am the same. Time is funny that way.

Some of what I found came in handy, some went into the garbage reflecting a new definition of utility, and three motivational wall hangings received a reprieve from their confinement.

Dream your tomorrow

Believe in your dreams

Keep calm and carry on

I am not sure why I chose these sayings back then — did they really resonate with me or did I just have lots of wall space that needed to be covered? I’m leaning to the latter, for no other reason than they just don’t offer much in the way of motivation anymore. As I look at the words, I find them trite, and although there is a place for vision (and vision boards), I find them soft. I do realize Keep Calm and Carry On is a reminder regarding how to deal with bombs that are literally being dropped on your head, but I would suggest that these words have been turned into a merchandiser’s dream and lost any original meaning, and most definitely the character that lies behind it.

As I look through a different lens, I find my resurrected motivators are soft and without character to actually make things happen… and maybe that is it.

My lesson coming out of the pandemic is movement really matters — both literally and figuratively. It is how you develop the ability to get through things and with it, develop knowledge, strength, grit, and the ability keep your wits about you. And the more difficult the better!

Because Easy doesn’t change you

Comfort Kills

Work harder, nobody cares

Prepare for the unknown

Sure, these are also somewhat trite and can definitely be found on t-shirts in your Instagram feed, but they do reinforce that success and growth only happen when it’s hard and you have to put in the work.

This can not be found in dreams.

I will admit all of this is half baked and something I pondered the other day when I got a little nostalgic — and in the end, maybe just the evolution of the words I look to motivate me. But as an aside, if you have found that your dreams have come true, you’re comfortable and everything is easy-peasy, I wish you luck and there is no need to explain.

I understand. I just don’t care...*

… I have work to do.

iamgpe

*— this definitely came from a t-shirt which some of my friends will be receiving for Christmas.

Find your blind spots...

“I’m quite easy going”

A dear friend looked at me confused and said, “What are you talking about, you are one of the least easy-going people I know.”

I went on to explain myself with little success and we agreed to disagree.

Many things have happened since then — I shifted from a corporate setting to more of an entrepreneurial one, took on the city experience, became a professional blogger (you can say professional when you get paid), continued to craft my skill as a sales and marketing journeyman… and then a virus decided to make its presence known and changed everything. Like many of us, I hunkered down to ride out the storm, managed a small bubble, and worked hard to keep myself healthy and mentally sharp.

Segue to a small app called MindPal which became my companion to sharpen my mind — various games and puzzles designed to keep the mind challenged and nicely categorized to identify your strengths and those areas for development.

As the pandemic faded into fresh memory, I stopped playing MindPal and eagerly got back into a world that was the same but different — most importantly though, I was in motion again. Recently I picked MindPal for no other reason than to play some games, and in a non-pandemic mindset, intently studied the categories that in effect illustrated what my competencies looked like.

Speed, Memory, Attention, Flexibility, Language, Math and Problem Solving

I was not so much interested in the scores as much as the relative comparisons and was particularly relieved that Problem Solving was the strongest category (for no other reason than it validates my main value proposition). As I moved down the list I landed on flexibility and couldn’t help but smile.

Then, like now, she had been spot on.

Success comes with the ability to leverage your strengths and minimize your weaknesses and this ability creates the alchemy you need to meet any opportunity or challenge that comes your way. Unfortunately, an aspect of the human condition is to focus on our strengths (and those things that come easy to us) and shy away from our weaknesses (that are harder to deal with) — and this is a problem.

Not dealing with your weaknesses, to either turn them into strengths or minimize their impact, will impact the alchemy to drive success. Worse still, not recognizing you have a weakness simply creates a blind spot, and how will you make your way if you can’t see? I appreciate there are two viable strategies when looking at strengths and weaknesses — you could work to optimize your strengths and weaknesses so net-net you are in a good place or leverage your strengths so much that they overshadow your weaknesses and in effect become irrelevant. The merits of each can be debated but either way, you need to know what your weaknesses are and assess if they are impacting your success.

And one more thing.

There is a comfort that comes with our strengths because they come easy and during the pandemic, as I played with my MindPal app, I was reminded of a truism that tends to get dismissed because it is so counter intuitive — Comfort Kills.

We were not built to be too comfortable and are hardwired for challenge — if you don’t challenge your strengths and search out any blind spots (and improve on them), you will slowly find ourselves getting softer, weaker, duller, lazier, and less engaged; until one day you find yourself looking in the mirror asking yourself what happened.

I just gotta figure out the whole easy-going/flexibility thing.

iamgpe

What's the purpose of it all?

The question was posed just as he was about to jump into the water, “What’s the purpose of it all?” My answer was, admittedly with little thought, “There is no purpose at all, and in fact, from an evolutionary perspective you’ve done your job.”

It’s a privilege to have known my friends for a very long time, and as I like to say, “Life is what we have in common” — I’m almost certain I didn’t come up with that but it is apt. Most of us were able to make it up to a friend’s family cottage (that was built in 1904) but not all; life gets in the way of the best laid plans of mice and men. The food was good and the conversation was better; cycling, hiking, novelty waffles for breakfast, boating into town, a fire, and shared memories of a lifetime. It made for a great time..

Recently I read that success is defined as some talent plus luck and great success is defined as some talent plus lots of luck — any way you want to define success, the people around me have leveraged their talents and their luck and done well by any measure. Each of us also carry the literal and figurative scars of a life lived; they are part of our actions, part of how we look at things, and part of the stories we tell around the campfire. It has all made for very rich lives.

The reason I am writing about this weekend at all is because I was dared to write something that involved discussions of our favourite fruit, novelty waffles for breakfast and the advantages of tubeless tires, but not use the word “pithy”. With that little challenge behind me, I will admit the question regarding “the purpose of it all” is still resonating — a question for the ages to be sure and something great thinkers have tried to answer. It was trite for me to answer the way I did but I never said I was much of a thinker, and after putting some more thought into it, I still it haven’t come up with anything else of substance. I wonder if it can truly be answered.

Until there is a better answer, I will continue to work on developing some talent, get out there to make as much luck as possible, and foster those relationships that make everything worthwhile — at the very least, it’s an honourable pursuit. Very much like “light and love”.

For my brothers.

iamgpe