Mortality & Motivation
Patience, Worry, Conflict, and more
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Quote
Do you have the patience to wait
Till your mud settles and the water is clear?
Can you remain unmoving
Till the right action arises by itself?—Tao Te Ching
Story
Goals. Hustle. Drive. Achievement. Success. Money.
These are the concerns the ambitious 50 year-old podcast guest was known for.
In a candid moment, however, he revealed that recently he had experienced a major health scare. He was informed he only had some small number of months to live.
It turned out to be a misdiagnosis. What he had experienced was a one-off cardiac incident. Not a symptom of something more serious. The doctors told him he can expect to live a long and healthy life.
Then he admitted, almost sheepishly, “I had a couple of big goals. Things I’ve been working toward for a long time. But ever since this experience—this reminder of my own mortality—I’ve lost the motivation to accomplish these big goals.”
Listening, you could tell this was really disorienting for him. You could hear him trying to muster up the drive to accomplish things that he was so used to. But he will will have a hard time finding his motivation if he keeps looking in the same place, at the same goals.
You see, he seems to think that this close encounter with his own mortality has decreased his motivation, and probably temporarily.
But mortality doesn’t diminish motivation.
Mortality purifies motivation. It filters out irrelevant desires. It quiets the ambitions foisted upon a life by the false self.
Facing death frees motivation from misguided goals so that it can be channeled towards a person’s most generative contribution, which can be expressed in a multitude of ways, but will inevitably involve presence, love, and creativity.
This man’s motivation has not disappeared.
It remains.
The question is, will he cling to his “big goals” and try to conjure up the motivation to achieve them?
Or will he allow a new and true dream for his life to emerge, behind which the full force of his motivation is waiting to be unleashed?
Worry
From my friend cartoonist Paul Noth in the New Yorker a few months ago. His work is currently part of a show on comics and politics here in Milwaukee in advance of the Republican National Convention in July.
Crisis
Mumford told players there were two aspects to every crisis: danger and opportunity. "If you have the right mindset, he said, you can make the crisis work for you," Jackson wrote. "You have a chance to create a new identity for the team that will be even stronger than before. Suddenly the players perked up."
On the “jail to Yale, locker rooms to boardrooms” work of George Mumford (who I’ve previously mentioned), from How a sports psychologist helped make the Oilers Stanley Cup finalists. By the way, the Edmonton Oilers have come back from a 3-0 deficit in the NHL finals to force a game 7 for the Stanley Cup… that’s a big deal!
Four-Month Old
Struggling to find yourself?
Feeling disconnected from your sense of purpose?
Ready to make a change in your life but don't know how?
Grab a copy of my book The Way Home (which turned four months old this past week)!
"This inspires."—Publishers Weekly
It is a powerful guidebook for navigating the journey of inner transformation and life's transitions—career, relationship, identity, faith, and midlife.