Larry Weidel: Today I’m with my son, Adam Weidel who’s one of the wisest people I know. He’s been side by side with me in business for at least 25 years, and he’s my go-to person for my businesses, projects, and adventures.
Today we’re going to talk about motivation.
We’re always talking about various topics related to winning and recently we were talking about topics related to motivation. Here are a few insights that may be helpful.
Adam Weidel: I’m glad to be here.
LW: Let’s get into this thing and start talking about motivation.
Without motivation, you’re dead.
You have to protect your motivation and recognize motivation killers because that’s where the outside world is likely to attack you first.
AW: With all the visuals out there today, with social media and the news, it’s just nonstop.
You can’t open your eyes or open your phone without being come at in a hundred different directions.
LW: Bad news sells. That’s what they emphasize, but you can’t let yourself get tricked by that.
That’s why we want to talk about protecting your motivation and recognizing motivation killers because it’s not just the media. It’s everywhere.
It’s a big deal when you don’t have motivation. Your energy is sucked out of you.
Day in and day out, you do the same thing over and over again.
You settle into a boring routine, you’re not doing the extras, and you don’t make any progress. And then you feel stuck. It’s a downward spiral.
You then feel guilty and you know something’s off.
Not only are you bored, but you’re also boring to be around and you suck the life out of everyone.
I think we both know people that we might not want to be around because they’re not motivated to do anything.
AW: A hundred percent.
LW: The problem is that they have let themself get stuck.
It does lead to a downward spiral and then makes you look for easy answers.
People that tolerate you are other people that have got nothing going on. It’s a stage everybody can go through, and we all go through it from time to time.
You have to snap yourself out of it. It’s not a great feeling because there are no rewards. You have to do something about it because essentially your mind is not working right.
Humans are problem solvers and innovators. Our minds weren't designed to coast and that's why we have goals and dreams. When you have no motivation, you're dead—you become restless and frustrated. Click To Tweet
So Adam, what are things that made you realize that you have got to change things.
I know that at one time you were out in school in Colorado and things just got stale.
All of a sudden you got things on a trailer and you’re moving back from North Carolina. What happened there?
AW: I was in college out there, but I was pretty much done.
All my friends that I hung out with around there were kind of falling off.
At the time there was a lot of energy in North Carolina, and it was obvious to me that things had just kind of run their course.
There was no reason to sit around for six months or a year to see what was going to happen.
Things were happening in North Carolina so it was the obvious move I made with no hesitation about it.
LW: If you hadn’t, you would have been living in denial, and living in denial never ends well.
You were only five years old, but that was the same situation I was in when I was in Atlanta.
I never thought I was going to leave Atlanta. In fact, I used to tell Bob Turley and Art Williams that they’ll never get me to move because we moved 27 times by the time I was 21 years old.
The one thing I wanted was to never get in a situation where somebody could tell me to move just like they use to tell my father.
On any day, a letter could come in the mail and we had to move to some other non-exciting place that we didn’t choose.
As you know, I was sent to Atlanta. I loved Atlanta, but then all of a sudden things dried up.
Friends in the neighborhood got jobs and moved away. We tried to move to a different house and moved to another street. Well, those things all went belly up so I started getting restless.
The company had a moratorium on promotions up to the Regional Vice President level.
I decided that if I’m going to get promoted, I have to get out of Atlanta because there was no reason to stay.
I did know that I wasn’t happy and to get happy I had to be in a situation where I could get excited. Otherwise, I was just going to be going around in circles.
AW: I was not five years old when I moved back from college, in case anyone thought I was a genius learner at a young age, but I was five years when we moved from Atlanta.
I also don’t want this to be left out because I really do take a lot of pride in this with all that other stuff that was going on.
I would proudly like to announce that, at that time, in addition to everything else, I was not suspended, but permanently kicked out of the preschool I was in. Is that correct?
LW: In Atlanta?
AW: Yeah.
LW: Yeah. No one else had taken a mouth full of water from the water cooler, turned around, saw the principal, and spit it all out all over her. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.
AW: The actual story is that there was a little stool you stepped upon, and one of my little friends was at the water fountain at the time. I don’t know what I said to him, but whatever I said to him was funny because he laughed so hysterically that he spit the water out of his mouth.
To me, that was so fascinating, hilarious, and amusing that I said to him, “Hey, I’m going to get up there and drink some water and you say something funny.”
Mine was planned. His was totally not planned but spontaneous.
I got up there and he said something funny.
When he did, I turned my mouth with the water ready to go forward with the plan. Much to my surprise, the principal was there but I thought to myself, “the plan is already in motion, I’m just going to go ahead and go through with it.”
So yeah, she was in the wrong place at the wrong time. She wasn’t intentionally there, but she just got in the way of my plan at the moment.
LW: I think you’re the first five-year-old in that school to get into the hall of fame for being expelled at five years old.
AW: Yeah. I take a lot of pride in that actually.
LW: We had that going for us too.
When I wrote the blog, I put in six causes why people lack motivation. One of the ones that we talked about in the blog is dwelling on the past. It didn’t work in the past.
You have to look at one thing about rejection. When you start looking at rejection as an opportunity to learn, adjust and improve, it kind of changes everything.
What do you think about that?
AW: A body-building buddy of mine in college was the golden boy. He was Mr. Colorado, Mr. Fort Collins, every Mr. Collegiate, Colorado.
He won everything he did.
He went on to the national level which is a much bigger competition.
He got a bad beating as far as the competition goes, and he never, ever recovered from that one beating. He never competed again.
There are two types of people.
There are ones that when they get beat, decide that’s not going to happen again because they will not stop until they overcome or win.
Or there are people like him that they get beat one good time, and then it’s too much mentally and emotionally for them to handle it.
They don’t even risk it anymore after that. I’ll never forget him. He got to beat one time and he just never got over it as far as competing again.
LW: I remember watching you compete in one of those contests. These were shows you had to win to go pro.
There was a guy there that said he lived in Pittsburgh. He went finished second, nine years in the row, and won it on the 10th time.
Obviously, he had to be super frustrated and mad every time it happened, but he bounced back. He kept trying and finally won.
No one likes being rejected, but you got to control your mind. You have to be decisive, be focused, and keep your motivation if you are going to bounce back from something like rejection and failure. Motivation is a big deal. Click To Tweet
Adam, do you have any last word on the importance of motivation?
AW: I’ll just say this.
For anything you truly want to be or be better at, you need to surround yourself with people that are constantly beating you at whatever you’re doing or are better than you or both.
Don’t be like my friend thinking, you’re this great, you’re great at whatever you’re doing when the fact of the matter is, you’re just not around the top-level players.
Once you’re around the top-level players you’ll see what they’re doing, see how they’re doing things and learn from them.
At that point, the motivation comes to get on their level, be on their level and beat them to become better.
But you have to constantly surround yourself with people that are better than you and whatever you’re doing, or it’s almost impossible to up your game or business or whatever.
LW: Adam, thank you very much. You have to take charge of your mindset and get motivated and stay motivated.
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