Get Motivated!

Say you work for a big company where everyone’s working 1.75 jobs. The mood is downbeat, so the company needs some way to rekindle the fire in the employee-belly. They could hire more people. But what’s the most likely thing the people running the company will do to turn things around?

Yup, correct — they’ll bring in a motivational speaker.

So, one afternoon as work piles up on your desk you find yourself sitting in a room with your fatigued co-workers. You listen to some guy who ran a blockbuster investment firm in the late Nineties. You learn that this guy has spent his entire life getting around obstacles – he grew up poor but worked his way through college and graduate school. Then, he created a company from scratch and built it into an industry leader in five years. He even appeared on the cover of Fortune Magazine. Yes, this is one guy who really knows how to set his mind on a task and accomplish it.

The guy zips around on stage, a beaming force of pure positive energy, talking about “unleashing the power of the mind.” And you find yourself motivated to act. So you drag out your phone and do a Google search on The Motivator. And you discover that all this success happened before he lost $500 million in investor money, went to prison for fraud, and then started his new career as a motivational speaker.

You look around at the slack faces in the audience and realize that everyone is thinking the same thing – “I never, ever want to be like this guy.” And when he announces that it’s time to break into groups to do the Team Building Exercise, you all know it’s time to start brushing up those resumes.

Yes, this gathering is all the motivation you need to get going on that task you’ve been putting off for far too long.