Motivation: The key to your most significant achievements

Want to change your life? Find your mojo! It will drive you to greatness.

If you want to achieve great things in your life, you have to find the right motivation, the right mojo. Most real great achievements in life don’t come by accident. They are often fueled by months and years of discipline, along with a lot of just plain hard work. But the discipline and hard work won’t come without the right motivation.

We look up to a lot of celebrities, and we often seek to emulate them. But interview after interview with most of these celebrities reveals the same thing; they were all motivated to make the sacrifices needed to become great at their craft. Piano virtuosos tell the same story; their fame didn’t come until they put in the years and years of practice needed to rise to the top of their profession.

Our elite sports athletes tell us the same stories. Tom Brady, arguably the best US National Football League player of all time, was not seen as a particularly gifted athlete when he started playing for the University of Michigan football team. But he was motivated to become the very best player that he could be, and was willing to put in the work to make his dream a reality.

We all can’t be celebrities or star athletes. But we all have the capacity within us to accomplish greater things than we ever thought possible. It all starts with finding the right motivation. We need to find our ‘Why’ as Simon Sinek would say, then nourish it.

Before you can rise to the challenge of significant achievements, you have GOT to have a solid mojo. Why do you want to reach a specific goal? What are you trying to achieve? What drives you? The motivation has to be strong, or you won’t get through the first significant obstacles you face. Achieving great things will require you to preserve and breakthrough these obstacles. These obstacles WILL come.

So what’s a good motivator? “Oh, I just need to lose ten pounds to look better in this dress,” might work during the time it takes to lose ten pounds, but when you get there, chances are you’ll stop whatever you’re doing. The weight will come right back and even bring a few friends. “If I study and get this certification, it might lead to a better position.” Unless you are strongly motivated to find that better position, chances are the first time you fail the certification test; you’ll quit. No, your motivation must be stronger than that.

Strong motivation starts with a strong sense of dissatisfaction. In studying the lives of great people, I have read a lot about Abraham Lincoln. The one item that stands out in young Abe’s life was how strongly dissatisfied he was with his position in his early life. Abe grew up working on his Father’s farm and received meager wages. By the time he was 18, he had moved away, deeply dissatisfied with his position in life and determined to make his life better.

This is a common thread through the lives of great leaders. Martin Luther King’s dream came from a place of deep dissatisfaction with the existing racial conditions in the South. He was determined to change it and called others to action. John Kennedy was dissatisfied with where America was in the ‘Space Race,’ and his call for action inspired us to land a man on the moon.

In my own life, all my accomplishments started with a sense of deep dissatisfaction. I became an Air Force Officer because I was dissatisfied with my life as an enlisted man and knew I could do more with my life. After I retired from the military, I went on to a successful career in Information Technology because I was dissatisfied with my job as a logistics analyst. Neither one of the previous situations was inherently bad, but I was unhappy with these positions and knew I could do more. I had developed the right mojo and was successful in both of these endeavors.

Perhaps the two most difficult challenges in my life so far were getting my PhD. and losing over 140 pounds. My PhD. in Information Technology was a long, hard road. I started when I was 53 years old. It took six years to achieve, and I did it while I was employed in the IT field. I had almost 18 months of setbacks during the dissertation phase of the PhD., and at one point, I developed a case of walking pneumonia, because I was working 12 hour days while pulling down two courses (a mistake I did not repeat). But in spite of all the setbacks, I walked across the stage in 2013 to receive my diploma. I had to ‘dig deep’ and reach for that mojo several times during the entire process.

As hard as the P.D. was, it paled in comparison to my next great achievement, which was losing 140 pounds. Shortly after I received my PhD. in 2013, I was involved in a very serious cycling accident that almost took my life. I became focused on recovering from my severe injuries and wasn’t concerned at all about my weight. Over the next four years, my lack of exercise and my almost total disregard for my diet caused my weight to balloon to nearly 348 pounds. I was so heavy that I couldn’t walk more than 100 yards without having to stop and rest. My blood pressure had sky-rocketed to over 200/100, and as my wife would say later, “I was just waiting for you to have a heart attack or stroke.” My body had become a ticking time bomb.

Along with my increase in weight and lack of exercise, I began to neglect my personal hygiene. Things were so bad that I was called into my boss’s office one day. He closed the door, proceeded to ‘dress me down’ about my weight and hygiene, and even made veiled threats to fire me if I didn’t change.

That was the motivation I needed. I knew that my weight was out of control, but until I was called out by a direct supervisor, I had no idea how others perceived my weight and personal hygiene. I didn’t get mad at the boss for calling me out; frankly, I was very embarrassed.

I changed my hygiene habits immediately. The weight was another issue. It took a medical scare that landed me in the emergency room with symptoms of a heart attack that solidified my motivation. I was NOT going to retire with such a low quality of life. I had plans to go on the lecture circuit, to teach, and to become a professional public speaker in retirement. I was NOT going to sit around, just waiting to die. That was NOT my idea of retirement.

I had found my motivation; now, I needed to find a lifestyle change program that would help me lose weight. Fortunately, some colleagues of mine introduced me to a lifestyle program called ‘Habits of Health’ (I can’t reveal the name of the company here because it would violate Medium’s advertisement rules — but if you’re interested google ‘Habits of Health.’ You will find it.) When she said, “Look, Dave, I have tried every program in the book, but this is the first program I could stick with for more than a couple weeks,” she had me hooked.

Was the program hard? Oh yea, the first couple of weeks was really hard! I was hungry. All. The. Time. The program is a nutritionally correct but calorie-restrictive program that reduces your food intake and virtually eliminates all processed sugar and processed carbs from your diet. It was hard to break my sugar addiction. It was even harder because I had to pass a table of sugary treats several times a day in my office.

But I stuck with it because I had the right motivation — the right mojo. The first week I lost 19 pounds — I was ecstatic! In the next couple of weeks, I have weight losses of 5–10 pounds a week, and I was on a roll. By the end of the first year, I had lost over 100 pounds.

I was going to stop after a year, but by then, I found that I couldn’t go back to my old eating habits. It seemed like I was on an autopilot of sorts. I was on an autopilot fueled by my mojo — a mojo that has me now down over 140 pounds (I just broke through the 200-pound barrier this morning — 199.5!).

I’m convinced that the key to accomplishing great things in life is to find the right internal motivation. This is usually driven by a sense of deep dissatisfaction, coupled with a strong sense of knowing you can do achieve anything given the right mindset. Hundreds, no, thousands of celebrities and athletes have done it. People from all walks of life have done extraordinary things. Achievements that even they didn’t think were possible. Yet they found the right internal motivation, and their mojo gave them the discipline and perseverance to accomplish greatness.

I leave you with this question. Do you want to achieve great things in your life? You don’t have to be a superstar to achieve greatness. It starts with finding a strong sense of motivation. Find the right mojo, and you will find the inner strength to discipline yourself for meeting the challenges before you. Find the right mojo, and you will achieve more than you could ever dream possible. Find the right motivation, and you WILL change your life.