Your ‘why’ is your fuel. Here’s why

Lionel Messi has gone on to become the best footballer ever over the last 20 years, but did he use a positive emotions or negative ones to drive him to his heights?

“When you have a why you can survive almost any how.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

After a while, believe it or not, it can actually become quite easy to get lost in the midst of all our work.

After an initial uphill battle, we can actually begin to build real, tangible momentum for us that carries us forward.

We start to find a groove that allows us to do what we’re supposed to with great consistency, shunning distractions and producing quality volumes of work.

This is it. This is where we want to be. Until it all gets a bit too much.

We begin plateauing.

Things get stale.

We’re now slower to start and quicker to finish.

Our desire is now being drained.

It’s not the same anymore.

As soon as we can we need to notice this slip in standards and stop. What has happened is we’ve lost sight of our purpose.

We’ve gone too hard and too granular for too long.

We’ve gone highly logical and that has served us well to a point, but now at this point, when things are starting to feel like a grind we need to step back and grease the cogs of the machine again.

We do this by inviting particular emotions into our minds.

Remembering exactly why we’re on this journey from a big picture point of view will give us that strength we need to persist during those difficult days.

And there will always be plenty of them, don’t worry about that!

It may be that we started this pursuit for inspirational reasons like wanting to change our own circumstances, or it may be to help those we love like our family, parents or friends to help them out of difficult situations.

Even Homer Simpson had a moving reason that allowed him to do his work, his baby girl.

“If I look at the mass I will never act. If I look at the one, I will.” — Mother Theresa

But our reasons can be negative too. Make no mistake.

We can use dark emotions like anger, rage, disgust, contempt, disappointment, fear, and wanting to prove someone wrong. As long as we channel it into our work, and know how to turn it off when the time calls for it, that works too.

Sport has some great examples of athletes who have used dark times to fuel them to future successes:

• Michael Jordan faced early disappointment when he wasn’t selected the first time round for his high school basketball team. He’s considered by many as not only the NBA’s best athlete but best athlete period.
• Tiger Woods faced public humiliation after being exposed for his sexual escapades. He’s come back and continued to win majors and is sits as the second leading majors holder.
• Lionel Messi was doubted as a child whether or not he would physically grow strong enough to cope with the demands of the men's game. He’s the game’s leading balon do’r holder.
• Rafael Nadal has suffered numerous serious injuries during his career. He continue today to be the world’s leading grand slam champion in tennis.

Tiger Woods celebrating his unlikely 2019 US masters win following a difficult decade of personal issues & serious injury.

The point is to just make sure that our emotional source of the drive is deeply personal. It must move us. That’s it.

So whatever the case may be, having that constant reminder of the link between our deeply meaningful reasons to pursue our ONE thing gives us a sense of clarity and underlines our strength of purpose, every single time we show up to work.

This is our unique advantage. Something that we have in our back pocket to turn to whenever we need it.

It bonds us to our work.

Now, this doesn’t mean our work will improve as a result.

In fact, the output may not be what we want either in quality or quantity for large periods.

But by tapping into our deeper emotional reasons, we’ll be able to increase our chances of persisting and getting through challenging moments.

When we persist for long enough, the quality will get there over time.
And that’s the key. Over time.