Source: businessinsider.com

What is the basic fuel that drives this blog? It’s motivation. When you see me writing about motivation, you should probably know, I am at a low point and I don’t necessarily feel like writing. What pushes me and others forward in situations like these? It’s not money, it’s not success, it’s conviction.

I like the hypothetical example Gary Vee have a while back, he said: document your life. If everything goes wrong and you can never monetize it, there is still a booby prize, your grandkids will get to see what their grandad struggled with at this particular age.

Gary explained that he never knew his grandad and how valuable it would have been for him to be able to look back and watch vlog of how his grandad may have felt at that same age to see how he dealt with it and to truly understand that he wasn’t alone in his feelings.

As someone who has written a diary before, I know that you forget specific elements at how you feel at a particular time, and recording that can have benefits for your own insight later on in life.

Whether it’s YouTube videos, Tik Tok or blogging, your thoughts now matter, even if it’s only for one person way down the road. There are people, no matter how few, that take an interest in what you think and what you are saying, it’s more a matter of getting it out there.

Tony Robbins Tapes

I am old enough to remember a time when Tony Robbins was on infomercials late at night selling his motivational tapes. Everyone knew him in the mid to early 90’s. He even became such a cultural icon he was featured in pop culture references such as the show Family Guy. I still laugh when I think of his character remarking at a book signing: “Tony Robbins Hungry”.

Source: funnyjunk.com

However, when you go through a trying situation like a business failure or a divorce (check both boxes for me), you start to listen to things in a different light. It just so happens at the time that the “worst” things were happening to me, I discovered that many of those motivational tapes and speeches from Tony Robbins were now on YouTube for free.

One of the things that stuck with me that he spoke of was “feeding your mind”. We all have a choice when we are feeling down or things go bad: we can get down on ourselves, or we can try to do something to pick ourselves up. Tony talked about how when he felt down he would feed his mind a lot of positive reading which would push him through to get what he wanted done.

One of those inspirations he mentioned was someone I have written about in the past on this blog: Dr. Viktor Frankl. His bestselling book called Man’s Search for Meaning, can be found in its audio version for free here and I have listened i it a number of times when I am feeling down.

Source: meaning.ca

In this book are a number of insights to Dr. Frankl’s experience and his overwhelming will to live, despite the most horrendous of circumstances: being a prisoner at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Dr. Frankl’s book carries the overwhelming weight of its legitimacy with me because of the fact that he wrote about inspiration and the will to live in situations that produce hopelessness in even some of the most stoic of people.

Dr. Frankl wrote his bestselling book over the course of 9 days after being released from Auschwitz. He even wrote it anonymously in the sense that it was:

written with the absolute conviction that, as an anonymous opus, it could never earn its author literary fame. I had wanted simply to convey to the reader, by way of a concrete example, that life holds a potential meaning under any conditions, even the most miserable ones. And I thought that if the point were demonstrated in a situation as extreme as that in a concentration camp, my book might gain a hearing. I therefore felt responsible for writing down what I had gone through.

Eventually he was convinced by his friends to put his name on it. His book definitely gained a hearing, selling millions of copies in the US. When asked about why his book was so successful though, rather than gloat, Dr. Frankl exclaimed:

In the first place I do not at all see in the bestselling status of my book an achievement or an accomplishment on my part, but rather an expression of the misery of our time…….if hundreds of thousands of people reach out for a book whose title promises to deal with a question as to the meaning of life, it must be a question that burns under their fingernails.

Dr. Frankl wrote dozens of books apart from his bestseller and with the one book he wanted to publish anonymously becoming a success, he admonished to his students:

Don’t aim for success, the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you will miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued, it must ensue. It can only do so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than one’s self.

The fact that someone who faced overwhelming odds that he was about to die anonymously, would take this view, is powerful and speaks to the power of conviction and passion to help others. This is what I feel truly drives readers to embrace the diversity of blogging and social media today: not the face that people want you to see but the vulnerability we all feel at times but are afraid to often share with one another.

Back to Basics

Vulnerability drives our fears which lead to inaction, complacency, mediocrity and even addiction. When confronted with these feelings, rather than run away and let them win, it’s more important than ever to push through them, to continue on. In my case, that means writing even when I am down, even when I don’t want to write. It means writing another post even if that means it won’t be value added in the financial sense. If people that have had everything in life taken from them have the will to push on, you the reader, and I can do it too. Find your purpose and get back to the basics of your why to push on.

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