Meaning of self-motivation
“You’ll never find a rainbow if you’re looking down. ”
-Charlie Chaplin
Failure is just like the strongest Mike Tyson iron punch right at your face. You will bleed profusely, and your mind will tell you to quit out of the game, but your heart..your heart is the sole game changer.
Why is your heart so important when it comes to standing up at the “twelfth round” in a boxing bout?
Before we deal with a very fragile and subtle term self-motivation that most people out there in the world do not know the real meaning, you must know that your heart speaks a language. I cannot call it to be the language of a supernatural presence or Language of God.
However, I do know that the heart can achieve what the mind cannot, provided you tune in the radio of your heart to the correct frequency to get the correct message. When your mind contradicts the heart, your heart will start speaking in a very subtle language- the language of self-motivation.
Not everyone can listen to the voice of their hearts. It takes tremendous self-motivation to be rejected by 12 publishers and still believe in your book! It takes self-motivation to laugh and make others laugh at unfortunate times. It takes self-motivation to believe in your company even if you are poverty-stricken. It takes real motivation to stand up even after losing loved ones. Your heart breaks when you are unfortunate, and then it starts speaking out.
Having said these, the following 5 famous failures can make you jump on your feet and start considering yourself lucky. The meaning of self-motivation will become crystal clear now!
I have a mustache of Hitler, but I make people laugh.
When he was 2 years old, his father abandoned him and his mother. No income for them forced Chaplin at 7 years old to make a living by child labor. As if to make circumstances worse, at the age of 9, his mother was committed to a mental asylum. During her battle with mental illness until her end in 1928, Chaplin and his brother Sydney had to go for weeks without food.
Her mother, Hannah, was a stage performer once. At the age of 5, when his mother lost her voice, Chaplin was brought in as an impromptu replacement because of his singing abilities. He lightened up the mood of the audience with his comedic angle that proved that he had potential.
“I was a newsvendor, printer, toymaker, doctor’s boy, etc. but during these occupational digressions, I never lost sight of my ultimate aim to become an actor. So between jobs, I would polish my shoes, brush my clothes, put on a clean collar, and make periodic calls at a theatrical agency. ”
If someone in black and white can make you laugh hard without speaking a word, what is the word “impossible” doing in your dictionary? Charlie Chaplin once said,
“We think too much and feel too little. ”
Self-motivation is giving more control to your heart while taking away control from your mind.
I had got a dream, and I got to protect it. I am in the pursuit of Happyness.
“I was homeless, but I wasn’t hopeless.”
A line from the American rags to riches billionaire Chris Gardener is enough to define self-motivation.
A scene of a homeless loving dad with a son and tears in his eyes in the station bathroom of a 2006 biographical film the Pursuit of Happyness starring Will Smith can bring tears to your eyes as well. If his story cannot motivate you, then nobody else’s can.
When Chris Gardener and his son were sleeping on the rough floor in a public toilet, he never imagined that he was creating his own life story that the whole world will watch!
Born in Wisconsin in poverty, Chris never knew his father. He only knew his inspirational mother and a physically abusive stepfather. There were times when he had to stay at foster homes as his mother grew enraged at times, trying to kill her abusive partner. In such tumultuous circumstances, he regarded his mother as an inspiration. A line from her struck him in his heart,
“Son, one day it will be you, who’ll make a million dollars. ”
After graduating from school, he enters the US navy. After being discharged in 1974, he became a medical equipment salesman in San Francisco, the city where he was homeless. Every time he came across the people coming out from Dean Witter Reynolds (DWR), a stockbroking firm, his dreams started to take shape. Success was far away from him until an encounter with a man in a red Ferrari that changed his life.
And then the rest you know is history with the so-called enemy called “luck” now becoming his friend. A homeless man alone with medical equipment to sell and his son to feed, rising to become a billionaire in America, is one of the best stories ever to be told about self-motivation.
If such an unfortunate man can dream big and believe in himself, why couldn’t you? Self-motivation is having hope and dreaming big no matter where and what you are.
“Boy with the broken brain”... That was my name. But I called myself Kwik.
Due to an accident when he was just 5, the doctor revealed that Jim would never be the same again. He will find it very difficult to be at school.
“I remember my teacher pointing out to me talking to another adult, saying ‘That’s the boy with the broken brain’”
Jim Kwik would just look at the pages and the letters, which didn’t mean anything to him. A “retarded” student who took to reading comic books during his nighttime hours accredits his success to the X Men mutants, who led him to believe that there is a superhero in each one of us that needs to be discovered.
Kwik was once invited to a friend’s house in California for a trip that was a life-changing incident or “an epiphany” as he rightly states it. His friend’s father signaled Kwik that the brain was the key to everything he wanted. From then on, his brain was not an obstacle to him but an asset for a retarded boy who took three years to learn to read.
It might come as a huge jolt of surprise to you that this man does as his name speaks. He is the world expert in speed-reading, memory improvement, and optimal brain performance. He is a big brainer superhero who is the founder of Kwik Learning.
This brain performance coach shows that Self-motivation is discovering a superhero hidden inside you waiting to be unleashed.
I created a wizard who made your childhood beautiful with a flying broomstick and a magic wand.
If a brain performance expert can teach us to be superheroes, a writer can teach us to be a wizard with magic. The game of Quidditch might ring a bell! JK Rowling is an epitome of a personality that only future generations can look at in awe.
It was in the year 1990, at the age of 25 years old that a 4 hour delayed train gave form to a young wizard in her imagination, which was only needed to be fleshed out in detail.
Unfortunately, she lost her mother a few months after. She moved to Portugal to teach English, where she married a man and gave birth to a daughter in 1993. Her relationship was a rocky one, with her being a victim of domestic abuse, eventually causing divorce.
After the divorce, she moved to Edinburgh with her daughter to live with her younger sister. By the end of 1993, only three chapters of Harry Potter had been completed. In 1995, she had finished off with the manuscript for Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone. Even after hiring an agent, the 12 major publishing houses rejected her manuscript.
She was suicidal and was diagnosed with clinical depression.
This is where you would have put your life to a halt. This is where her heart spoke out when it broke.
At times like these, games do change and start favoring you. The words “there is still hope” echoed in her, and finally, one day, a small publishing house in London Bloomsbury published her book in the year 1997.
Rowling became the first author to become a billionaire by writing books.
At a point when you have almost given up, your self-motivation will carry you forward only if you allow it to take control of you. Do not put your heads down and start moving.
I will make Nikola Tesla immortal and colonize Mars.
His dad once said,
“He used to read books even while he was at a party...” referring to his nerdy son, who is now called a real-life iron man. His parents got divorced when he was only 9, and he caught interest in book reading at a very early age. He was only 12 when he sold his first self created video game at a whopping price of $500.
Elon Musk had a bad past at school where he was bullied to the extent of being hospitalized. Elon was smart and different from all the others, which made him a victim of a bully. Being South African born, as per the tradition in those days, it was mandatory to serve in the military once the child reaches 18. To avoid this, Elon fled to his Canadian mother’s relatives when he was 17.
After getting admitted for Ph.D. in Applied Physics at Stanford University, a very prominent university, he dropped out after 2 days to create a company Zip2 with his brother, which was sold off to Compaq for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock which made him rich. He used to sleep at his office and took showers in a nearby gym to save costs.
Later he created Paypal from where he was fired as a CEO. The company was sold to eBay in billions, and that is how he got rich.
He took the dive and reinvested the money into Tesla motors. Tesla, as you know, is now ruling the electric car segment.
But the story did not halt here. There was another dangerous investment made by Elon that could cost him his life in poverty! He invested in building rockets. You would not believe it, but he self-taught the art of building rockets and found the company called Space X with a dream to reduce space transportation costs and colonize Mars!
Elon Musk is just a human being with a big vision. The first rocket was a failure, and so were the second and the third. The last rocket meant life and death for him. You can see the tears on Elon’s eyes when he narrates this incident today. He was successful in his fourth launch.
Elon Musk stammers a lot while speaking on stage, but this does not stop him from speaking. If a human being has that self-motivation to teach himself rocket science and take risks for life and death, you too have it in you. Do not stop dreaming. Self-motivation will lead the way for you previously considered impossible. You can be an iron man too.
There are hundreds and thousands of inspiring personalities that have left their mark on this planet for other people to look up to and follow.
The above are just five personalities out of those whose stories will self motivate you to look into yours and call yourself possessing a better advantage than they had. Opportunities are created, not born with.
Last but not least, here is a quote from Paulo Coelho, the author of The Alchemist, that can kick start your life.
“When you want something, all the universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. ”
Now you do understand why you cannot find a rainbow if you look down.
Be inspired.
How iconic personalities define the meaning of self-motivation
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