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If
you want to be successful, who better to tell you how than people who've achieved great
success in their own lives? Over the years, we've asked hundreds of champions in various
fields to share their winning motivational secrets
You've heard it all your life: To be
successful, you need motivation. You got the message from Mom and Dad, teachers and
coaches. Athletes, celebrities and business leaders all attribute their success to having
been motivated to excel.
But even if you've had some great pep talks, you know
keeping that inspiration is hard. What's the secret to staying motivated throughout your
daily life? We asked 10 of the nation's greatest athletes, coaches and business gurus to
tell us in their own words what keeps them going, and what advice they have for the rest
of us.
Dick Vitale is a college basketball announcer
for ESPN and ABC, and a former coach.
It all starts
with goals. You need long-term goals, short-term goals and — this is important —
a game plan. There are a lot of people who can articulate their goals and desires, but
they lack a plan to get where they want to go.
The other things you need are energy, enthusiasm and
excitement — a passion for what you do — so you can make things happen in your
own life. Whether I'm doing a telecast, giving a speech or doing an appearance, I try to
have fun and be excited. I feel and act like I'm 12 even though I'm 57.
Finally, don't be afraid of failure, because if you
are, you'll never-accomplish anything. And don't ever believe it when people say
"can’t." If I had listened to those people, I'd never have become a coach
or a broadcaster, I wouldn’t have written five books, I wouldn’t be on David
Letterman’s Show. And if it can happen for me, it can happen to anyone. I’m a
very ordinary guy.
Barry Bonds,
the San Francisco Giants slugger and left fielder, is one
of the most successful and highest-paid players in baseball.
A
lot of things keep me motivated over the long term. I work as hard during the off-season
as I do during the season so I'll be worth every penny the Giants are paying me, and so I
can give the fans what they deserve every day. I don't want to let anybody [on the team]
down, because when that happens, it's not a good feeling, especially when we're playing
well. I'm always able to come back, but you don't want to slip in the first place, to have
to keep climbing that mountain. You want to avoid that situation. What keeps me going is
the desire to put myself in a position so that other players play better and the team can
win.
Peter Vidmar was captain of the 1984 United
States Gymnastics Team, which won a gold medal at the Olympics in Los Angeles.
You need a clear vision of your objective. If you know your goals — whether
for the next three months or the next three years — when you get stressed out and ask
yourself if they're worth working for, you should be able to say yes, even at the end of a
hard day. A big part of that is re-evaluating things regularly and planning, long-term and
short-term. Making lists of things to accomplish on a weekly and daily basis just takes
minutes, but it makes you a lot more effective.
Something else I noticed when I trained as a gymnast
was that everyone works out hard when things are going well, they feel good and they're
getting results. But the best of them figure out a way to stay focused and diligent even
when they don't feel like it. For me, that's the most important thing to work for —
to keep up the effort when things fall apart. One way to do that is to establish
deadlines. That's easy when you're a competitive athlete like I was. You can't move the
deadlines — the Olympics are in the year 2000, and that's that. When you're just
talking about fitness or losing weight, you can change the deadline as time moves along.
But if you don't allow yourself to do that, if you set deadlines and meet them, you've got
a better chance of meeting your goals.
Harvey Mackay
is CEO of the Mackay Envelope Corporation and author of several
best-selling business books, including Swim With Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive
(Ballantine, $13).
You should surround yourself with winners, with successful people from any
endeavor — whether they're business people, writers, sculptors, athletes —
people who love what they're doing and are good at what they do. [Former Notre Dame
football coach] Lou Holtz is a good friend of mine, and when I'm around him, his
excellence and sense of achievement rub off on me. If you do the same, those people will
help keep you up and motivated.
Always remember that it's not dog-eat-dog out there,
it's rat-eat-rat. It's tough getting up and going out there every day and trying to
succeed. You need all the help you can get. You spend 3½ years of your life in your car
if you drive 10,000 miles a year, so make that time count by listening to motivational
tapes. Turn your car into a university. In your spare time, read inspirational books. You
need help to stay motivated, and you need to stay motivated to be successful.
Also, a good habit to develop is to write
things down if you want to remember them and stay focused on them. You forget 50 percent
of what you hear within four hours, so if you want to retain information that's important
to you, to make it your own, write it down.
Rocky Bleier made it onto the Pittsburgh
Steelers despite a lack of size and natural talent, but soon afterward he was drafted and
sent to Vietnam, where he was seriously wounded. Upon recovery, he made the team again and
helped win four Super Bowls.
Motivation doesn't mean you have to be up all the time — even the most
successful, best-motivated people have cloudy days, and you have to understand that. As
for maintaining a sense of motivation and purpose for the long haul, you need a belief
system, a past, a heritage, a tradition — the stuff you get from family. These are
the things that make you who you are, that define your self-image.
As you grow, these things are challenged. You
have doubts, or people say you can't do something because of their own fears or jealousies
or feelings of inadequacy. But if you have an idea of who you are and what you want to
become, you can handle those doubts. Meanwhile, your self-image may adjust as new
information comes to you from people, experiences or reading -- but hopefully, your
self-image is also reinforced. It's a constant learning process of reanalysis and renewed
focus; if you don't like your circumstances, you have to take control and change them.
John Amatt
helped lead the first Canadian team of
climbers to the top of Mount Everest in 1982.
Motivation derives from focus and desire. For me, it all comes from the fact that
I wasn't successful in my own mind. I didn't attain the status I wanted when I was in high
school, so in my adult life I wanted to prove I could make it. In high school, there are
the ins and outs. The ins are the kids on the football team, the ones who excel
academically, the popular ones. I was an out; I was shy. And ever since, I've been trying
to achieve the success I desired as a kid. That's fairly common; the outs are often more
successful than the ins later in life.
I am not, however, goal-oriented. If you have too
many goals, you set yourself up for failure, especially in this rapidly changing world. By
the time you attain a goal, it may be irrelevant. But I do have a visionary sense of
direction. People need that sense of where they want to be, but they have to be flexible
about the path. That's my approach. I don't know when I'll get there, but I'm comfortable
with that.
You also have to fight complacency. How can I
be better today than yesterday? You need to be dissatisfied in a positive way and pursue
perfection. Find new ways to do what you do better. Try new things, find new arenas of
challenge. You risk failure doing that, but you have to accept anxiety, fear and the risk
of failure to progress in your life. In the modern world, that's certainly better than the
risks of complacency. If you stay where you are now, you're being left behind.
Dave Carey
is a former Navy pilot who was shot down our Vietnam, where he
spent 5½ years as a prisoner of war.
As
far as I'm concerned, staying motivated is a matter of habits, and you have to be careful
about the habits you develop. Take getting started in the morning. Do you get up
vigorously or slug-like? How you begin your day affects how your day will go. Then look at
how you spend your spare time. If you exercise, you're taking care of the machinery, the
vessel you live in. Or you develop debilitating habits. like drinking too much or sitting
around watching television — that's really noxious. Garbage in, garbage out. And you
need to be careful of what you surround yourself with and what kind of people you spend
time with. You have to pay attention to how you structure your day and your time.
Part of this is spiritual; you need to pull back from
the helter-skelter of daily life and consider what's happening to you and where you're
going. Otherwise, little by little, you get off of your path, whatever it is. You get into
slumps and end up places where you don't want to be.
Beyond that, you need to recognize how
resilient, resourceful and powerful you are. Some appreciation of that is necessary to
move yourself forward and avoid succumbing to inertia. We're all stronger than we think.
All you have to do is reflect on the most terrible thing that ever happened to you. At the
time, you don't think you can make it, but you do. You keep putting one foot forward after
another, you just keep going one day at a time. Whatever the trauma was, you managed to
get through it. You can translate all of that into your daily life; consider how much more
capable you can be.
Denis Waitley,
Ph.D, has written 10 books on sell-improvement, including the
top-selling Being the Best (Pocket Books, $6).
The first thing to do is get a support group of like-minded, optimistic people
with positive goals. You want to get together with people who have a desire for health and
positive self-improvement, and they should be people out of your normal routine. You need
at least three others, and you should meet once a week or so for breakfast or lunch. Most
pep talks wear off in three or four days, so just going to a motivation seminar doesn't
cut it. But with your own group of goal-oriented optimists, you pump each other up on a
regular basis.
You also want to exercise, especially in the
morning. That gets your energy levels and endorphins up early and helps carry you
throughout the day. You get all those benefits during the workday, when you want to be
most productive.
Then there are a lot of little things you can do to
make your day more pleasant. I wake up to music instead of an alarm; it's just a nicer way
to awaken. I avoid the news early in the morning so I don't start the day worried or
upset. And instead of reading tabloids or things like that, read information that will
improve your life. I especially like inspirational biographies of people who have made
turnarounds in their lives and succeeded in spite of misfortune. The whole key to staying
motivated is realizing that knowledge is power, and getting the right kind of knowledge.
Brian Tracy
is a management guru whose books include The Great Little Book on
Personal Achievement (Career Press. $7).
Take care of your
health and fitness; there's nothing more de-motivating than not being healthy. If you're
not already exercising, you should start. Eat right and avoid fats, sugars, smoking and
drinking.
The other reason people feel de-motivated is
because they're overwhelmed by events and the things going on around them. you need to
take complete responsibility for your life and your future. Whenever you're confronted
with decisions or situations that cause stress, you have to remind yourself that you're in
control. Tell yourself, "I am responsible."
You need to talk to yourself all the time. Ninety
percent of your emotion comes from that inner dialog, and the key is to explain things to
yourself in a positive way. Take a depressed person, someone who's completely miserable.
Then you tell him he won the lottery, and he's not depressed anymore. Nothing has really
changed except the way he interprets the world. Successful people keep feeding themselves
positive, nourishing thoughts. You can tell yourself you can do something just as well as
you can say you can't.
Pat Williams
is the senior executive vice president of the NBA’s Orlando
Magic.
You need to remind yourself that you're only on this earth for a
short period of time, and you want to make it count. In my case, I want to have a positive
impact on people, and that's one of the things that motivates me the most. Another thing
that keeps me motivated is the desire to learn — you never want to stagnate. Reading
is especially important, but what you read is critical. I like reading about baseball and
the Civil War, and I read the Bible every day. I read everything I can about
self-improvement, too. You've got to keep motivational material around, things that
inspire you.
Mark Twain once said he could get along all day on
one compliment. That's what builders do, and that's the kind of person you want to be.
by Terry Mulgannon
- a
highly motivated and successful freelance writer and editor. |
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