Why You Can’t Learn Motivation at a Seminar

A motivational speaker candidly writes, I often bring a magic wand to my face-to-face seminars and university classes. The audience usually emits a loud chuckle when I ask for a volunteer and proceed to wave my magic wand over their head and declare them “motivated.” While this approach is conceivably absurd, many motivation books and speakers imply that by simply following the author’s guidance you will instantly become motivated. Authors of these books declare their methods are proven: when one explicitly follows their formula, intense drive and immediate success will result…leading to massive wealth.

People think that motivation is everything. Motivation is a lot – but it’s by no means everything!

Let’s talk about generating wealth. Hard work and motivation are necessary conditions for making a lot of money, but they’re far from enough. In order to make a lot of money, there has to be sufficient customer demand for what you’re making, along with insufficient supply. In the best case, you discover or create a product or service that nobody has brought to market yet, and that mass numbers of people—it turns out—end up wanting. The iPhone comes to mind.  Before that, it was things like the automobile, the toaster, the personal computer, radio and televisions. And of course, clothing and houses, as improvements made in those industries tended to generate greater affordability and more demand.

The bad news is that mass wealth creation is unlikely, even if you are highly capable and motivated. The good news? Making enough money, or more than enough, to satisfy your needs while remaining autonomous and self-employed is always a possibility. There might already be plenty of supply and demand for something, but that doesn’t mean there’s no room for you to help meet that demand. If you want to pursue what you love, and you want to make at least a decent living at it, it’s almost always within reach, at least if you live in an economically unrestrained, low-tax, low-regulation environment. Unfortunately, however, almost nobody does anymore.

Aside from supply and demand, it takes other things to create success. One is a belief that you love doing the activity for its own sake, and that it’s all worth it even if great success is not guaranteed. Look at anyone who achieves success in fields like music, writing or art. Those are really difficult fields. Yet if you study the record and history of anyone who achieved in those fields, you’ll find periods—sometimes long periods—of uncertainty and doubt, where success seemed highly unlikely. This is one reason why you can’t go to a motivational seminar to “learn motivation”. The motivation has to come from you. If you were really all that motivated, you’d get down to work rather than spending time at a seminar! One thing that causes the motivation? A deeply felt commitment and desire to do the thing you’re doing. Nobody can teach you that. It’s just there, waiting to be exploited and developed. The key is finding it.

Sometimes people tell me, “I really would like to do that. But I’m not motivated.” My first response usually is, “So you’re not really committed enough to it, then? You don’t really want it enough?” My response is not always appreciated, but think about it. Think about the things you ARE motivated to do; even routine things like grocery shopping or personal hygiene. Don’t those come automatically, since the alternative to doing them strikes you as unacceptable or unbearable? It’s the same with achievements in career or business. Unless you find living without the activity unbearable, you probably won’t get very far.

The challenge psychologically is not to “learn motivation” so much as to discover what motivates you. That can be difficult, but it’s crucially important. Your emotions will tell you. Emotions cannot tell us what’s right, true or how to rationally do things. But emotions are great at telling us what’s important to us. If reason overrides a particular emotion, so be it. But pay attention to your emotions so you can better discover what you really love, value or enjoy. Don’t judge your emotions—not at first, at least. You can later apply reason to figuring out the best way to achieve what your emotions desire, or to assess their plausibility. But if you’re totally unaware of what makes you passionate and therefore don’t feel motivated, it’s a likely indication you need to pay better attention to what you feel.