GarthBox

It’s easier to call motivation forward when you are facing the right challenge.

I’ve tested out challenging myself, I’ve tested out having my heroes challenge me, and I’ve tested having strangers challenge me. Here’s the breakdown.

Challenging Yourself

It’s a great initiator. Challenging yourself brings forth the motivation to start. Challenging yourself is a personal win, not often shared by others. Unfortunately, playing against yourself is only fun for a short while. Then it’s time to lean on the next challenge.

Heroes Challenging You

You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with, that’s a given, but to get better than the people you surround yourself with you have to blow their expectations away. I find asking your idols, mentors, teachers, heroes to challenge you. Ask them to give you something that goes over your head. The motivation heroes’ challenges creates is enough to get you a level up and often through any rough patches.

Strangers Challenging You

I once got a birthday card with a man cliff diving on it. The quote beneath the image was from Walter Bagehot. “The great pleasure in life is doing something that others say you cannot do.” When strangers challenge you, they call forth the motivation to prove yourself right. You’ve used the positive powers of self-motivation and inspiration with the first two challenges – this one is about using the more…”passionate” we’ll say, side.

Go forward and use these challenges to motivate yourself to reach your wildest dreams, especially the ones no one thought you would.

One last thing, notice how I didn’t specify that those who challenge you ought to also teach you.

 

Stay Positive & Artists Are All Self-Taught

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I’ve noticed a trend in every business, self-help, marketing, financial, biography, auto-biography, interview I’ve read, watched or listened to involving someone successful.

Every single person who has obtained great wealth has said that “it is the greatest time to be alive” or “there’s never been a better time to get out there and make a difference, take a risk.”

These videos and books I’ve read date back to the earliest of civilizations. Successful people were saying the same thing then as they are now.

Yesterday I wrote about selling attitude. As I study and experience more, I’m realizing how much in the world hasn’t changed. Those who won in the past, in the industrial age, in the agriculture age were the ones who sold attitude.

And what is attitude?

It’s really just a matter of perspective.

Do you believe this is the best time in all of history to start, to make a difference, to try something new? Ought you?

 

Stay Positive & Pick Your Perspective

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More and more you’re selling your personality, your attitude, your smile, your gut-feeling, your self-“insert word like reassurance, motivation or esteem here.”

In the past, and still in some places, but even those are withering away, what mattered was your pace, your productivity, your input to output ratio. You were a number and all you did had a $ attached to it. At the end of each day you were graded by the “progress” you made.

It’s not that way anymore. That was a physical and mentally exhausting labor.

Now the economy is rewarding the emotional laborers of the work place. The ones that arrive and energize those around them.

I’ve told marketing colleagues, business colleagues, and laypeople alike, that when you walk in a room you set the energy. Let me disclose a quick story.

A friend wanted to share a TV segment he landed with a group of agency-touring students, but was concerned they would find it lame. When he shared the idea with me, he was excited, he was moving, he made it interesting. I told him they would love it if he went in there with the same energy he came to me with.

After the students gathered in the conference room, he shared the segment and the class was enthralled. Partially with how cool the segment was, but more importantly with the energy of the person who landed it.

What you want to sell, share, give, take or create becomes wildly easier once you’ve made your energy, your level of engagement, and your attitude clear and captive. This goes for even the most conventional and bureaucratic of places.

 

Stay Positive & What Energy Are You Setting?

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There’s an expectation at my workplace that if you’re in a room, you better speak up.

You’re expected to contribute, to ask a question, to make a difference.

I used to think the expectation would result in a lot of noise, dumb questions, and people struggling to speak just to check the box.

Fortunately, it’s also known that if you’re in the room, you’re there because you matter, people believe in you, and, if anything, they want to help you grow smarter.

The real challenge then isn’t coming up with something that moves the team or an idea forward. No. The real challenge is being missed if you’re not in the room.

And that goes for any room, not just the ones at my work.

 

Stay Positive & Make A Difference, Not Just Noise

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The questions worth asking are often the ones worth asking again and again and again.

• How could we make this better?
• Are we talking to ourselves?
• Do the actions we’re planning to take today align with our end goal?
• What did we learn?
• Why?
• Why not?
• Will they give a shit?

If you don’t ask the questions or if you ask the questions and the answers change, it’s a red flag. Indicative you may be off the right path or you have stopped moving forward.

If you ask the questions and the answers don’t change, it’s a red flag. Indicative you’ve given up trying new things, pushing boundaries, and finding new edges to dance on.

When we go fishing for answers, it’s the fishing that matters.

No, there’s no right answer. That’s not the point of asking the questions.

 

Stay Positive & Curious With Questions

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It doesn’t really matter what you make with lemons, what matters is you use everything you can from them, squeeze them, get the most out of them.

The way lemons (opportunities) work in life is they’re repeatable. Once you squeeze something out of a lemon, you get to do it again. And again. And again.

We live in a world of endless lemons.

As a little ol’ intern in a PR agency, I would squeeze all I could from those bigger and better than me. I would ask to sit in on meetings where things would fly over my head and I would have to connect the dots and pick up on the lingo and ask questions that made me feel stupid for not knowing the answer to. I squeezed the lemons.

Then I got hired full-time at that agency. Do you think I stopped squeezing the lemons?

I wanted to. After all, I got what I was hoping for. It was hard to keep squeezing lemons, but it goes back to my post on taking initiative; it doesn’t get easier, especially as you reach the larger goals you set for yourself.

In fact, it gets easier to settle, to stop, to let the lemons sit there and rot.

 

Stay Positive & It Doesn’t Get Easier, But It Will Always Be Worth It

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Unlike many other concepts in the world, I’m not completely sure taking initiative gets easier the more you do it.

I’ve trail-blazed for four years now and I still get uncomfortable when I start to take initiative. I still feel the urge to get approval, to have some reassurance, some support to lead.

There are two activities you can do to help move forward.

The first is to remind yourself the fear you feel when you begin to take initiative is not an indicator that you shouldn’t take it. Responsibility is uncomfortable. As Brene Brown says, you can’t be courageous and comfortable at the same time.

Secondly, I remind myself of how what I’m doing will benefit others. I fight my lizard brain with a cost-benefit analysis. While it only looks at the harm to myself, I look at the benefit my initiative will offer to others.

Hope this helps.

 

Stay Positive & Go Take Initiative

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