The best motivation will never come from a speaker or quote.
The best motivation comes from your experiences and adversity. How you utilize this motivation to transform your thoughts, behaviors, and actions will define you and separate you from your peers.
Motivation is internal, not external. It has to be.
We have control over our minds, emotions, and bodies for our entire lives. Therefore, we control how we interpret the world around us, as well as how we respond to circumstances outside our control. No matter the circumstance, we internally control our response.
External circumstances, and your overarching external environment, constantly change throughout your life. You start new jobs, lose and gain friends, and pursue different interests at different stages in your life. If you try and discover motivation in the external, you will find that motivation temporal in nature– as soon as the external force changes or vanishes, so will your motivation. When motivation fluctuates too frequently, you cannot consistently pursue your passion and purpose.
And although you grow and develop throughout your life, you can always rely on your core beliefs and identity. These two forces do not change. Initiate and ignite your motivation internally, and you’ll enable your purpose and passion to persist long past temporary circumstances.
With your purpose in mind, you’ll have your WHY in place. With passion in your heart, you’ll bring your purpose to life in all your actions (the HOW). With motivation in your core, you can rely on persistence to realign and enhance the continued actions that derive from your beliefs and identity. Persistence is key, since it holds you accountable in fulfilling your ultimate purpose. Motivation is the persistence that keeps your purpose in mind and passion in your heart.
Internal motivation aligns with purpose and passion in two ways: 1) just like your mind and your heart, motivation is internal and unique to you; 2) your mind, heart, and identity will stay intact even when the external environment changes. Motivation must be internal so that it aligns with your purpose and passion and offers a sustainable, anchored path for your lifelong journey.
You can lead a camel to water, but you can’t make it drink. Motivational speakers, motivational quotes, motivational yadi yadi yadda … they can only lead you so far. The only way you can drink is if you take a dive into your own pool (comprised of your purpose, passion, and persistence) and drink for yourself. Take a nice, long slurp and see the water replenish itself as you leverage your mind, heart, and identity to learn from, adapt to, and grow alongside your unique experiences.
Speaking of your experiences … there is no teacher greater than that of experience itself. Actually, that’s not entirely true. The experience itself is the lesson, and you are the teacher required to transform it into insight. With this insight, you can truly learn, adapt, and grow as you accumulate your experiences. Every new learning, adaptation, or growth filters into a pool of experience. Alongside your pool of purpose, passion, and persistence, your pool of experience serves to enhance your approach to new experiences, thus creating a virtuous cycle of learning, adapting, and growing.
Within your pool of experience, you can specifically leverage the adversities you’ve encountered throughout your life. Adversity, as opposed to success, provides motivation as a byproduct of the learning, adaptation, and growth required to overcome adversity. The more adversity you conquer, the more equipped and motivated you become in tackling future adversity (which represents the virtuous cycle). Your pool of experience, especially your adversity, will equip you, encourage you, and motivate you to plunge forward toward new terrain.
Your pool of experience continually reinforces your approach to the changing circumstances in your life, because you can take and apply insight from similar experiences in your past. Look at your pool of experience as a repository of information that informs your current decision-making. And look at your pool of purpose, passion, and persistence as the ecosystem that motivates and aligns your experiences with your current circumstance. Both of your pools are internal to you, anchored to your unchanging core and identity, and develop organically over time to elevate your overarching mission in life.
Short story even shorter: motivation is driven from inside, not outside. By all means, leverage external circumstance as a way to learn from experience and develop your insights. But at the end of the day, you have to drink from your own pool. Drinking from your own pool keeps you accountable, provides you with ownership, and lets you push further by quenching your thirst every time you’re parched (you never know when you’ll be thirsty, so you may as well establish a permanent water source that hydrates you with purpose, passion, persistence, and experiences).
Motivation is the persistence required to teach yourself how to swim in your pool. As you learn how to swim, you reinforce your passion by diligently focusing on the next stroke of your arm or kick of the leg. And as you match your technique with the current of your pool, you can adapt to any change in the current as you swim toward your purpose in life. Motivation and purpose are connected through your passion and persistence – the WHY, the HOW, and the WHAT must be aligned before you can touch the butt (yes, that’s a Finding Nemo reference).
Keep swimming. You may find out that your pool is actually an ocean. An ocean full of promise, potential, and purpose ripe for fulfillment.
*This post was inspired by “Three Feet from Gold.” I highly recommend this book as an additional resource that can help reframe your perspective on persistence, adversity, and true triumph.
