Day: July 11, 2022

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Declaring your Motive

What do you do in life? And what is the reason for doing what you are doing? The reason for doing what you are doing is called motive. What is your motive? It is very common to hear this kind of question. Your motive is the reason for doing something. Declaring your motive is taking a right step in the right direction.

For different people there are tons of reasons for doing a particular thing or taking a particular action. Let’s take for instance the issue of work, people work for so many reasons while some work to build a career, others work to take care of their personal needs and that of their dependents. Yet others work because they derive a sense of joy and fulfillment by working. Hence, whatever reason they may give for working is the motive behind the work they do.

Having a motive in everything you do is very important. In the quest for success it very pivotal to and a strong signal to success. For you to keep a date with success and become successful in whatever it is you are doing you must have a motive. So many people have ended up in the doldrums of mediocrity either because they lack motive or they are not able to define and coordinate their motive well. It is one thing to have a motive, and another thing to declare it.

Declaring your motive

In any situation you find yourself always endeavor to declare your motive. Declaring your motive means to keep your priorities straight. It means to be well acquainted with the reasons why you do what you are doing. For instance, if your motive in life is to succeed, then you must keep your priorities straight.  Whatever step that will help you succeed becomes your utmost priority. In this situation the first priority will be to make it clear that you want to succeed in life. You must make success the keyword of your mission statement.

The second priority should be to understand why you want to succeed. Is it to exploit people or to add value to their lives? And the third priority is to set your motive in motion. Ask yourself this pertinent question, ’if my motive is to succeed in life, what must I do to succeed. Explore options to make your motive of success a reality. Devise means to create values. It is the creation and exchange of values that makes a person successful.

From whichever angle you look at it, the issue of motive cannot be isolated from success. Motive is a major backbone of success without which any quest for success becomes numb and incapacitated. Declaring your motive in life is akin to declaring your interest to vie for a political position. For people to know that you are serious so as to rally around you, you must show some level of commitment. You must as well show commitment to success or you will end up in mediocrity. This you can conveniently do by declaring your motive.

Your motive and success

Like I did say earlier, you cannot isolate your success from your motive. Your motive as a matter of fact strengthens your resolve to succeed. You can only succeed within the ambit of your motive. In one of my post I did say that Purpose is one of the driving forces of life.

Understand that your motive is your purpose and it is a determinant of whether you succeed or fail in life. It helps you to succeed and to make maximum impact in life. And to do that all your efforts and pursuit in life must be driven by your motive.

Motive like Purpose is what defines and guides our actions in life. It consists of a high level commitment to a course in life. Motive is the motivation, the push, the impetus we need to succeed in life. It is a driving force behind your pursuit in life which must be harnessed if you hope to have a remarkable or landmark achievement in life. It is a success driver.

Motive driven by passion

 Every man without passions has within him no principle of action, nor motive to act – Claude Adrien Helvetius

Your motive is powered by your passion. Hence your strong passion for success fuels your motive. One important features of this motive is that it comes with ideas – ‘motive ideas’. These are ideas that inspire and help one to act accordingly. Motive once defined and declared helps you to brainstorm and generate actionable ideas.

Consequently, if don’t have motive you will lack the principle of action. Hence where there is no interest or passion, there is no motive. And where there is no motive there is no ideas, and invariably there will be no action.

 Finally, what is the motive force behind your pursuit in life? In that business what is your motive force? In your career what is actually the motive force? As a politician what is the motive force behind your political ambition? Like I said earlier your motive is a strong indicator and signal of success.

Therefore in any sphere of influence you found yourself let success be the motive force behind all your pursuit in life.

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Positive Worldview: A Better Cognitive Orientation of Life.

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Holding a positive worldview about life is the key to successful living. I remembered as a fresh student in the university, one of our senior lecturers then, an erudite scholar and a one-time national security adviser to a former military head of state taught us a course. I could remember vividly it was a course on epistemology, and he asked us, ‘What is weltanschauung?’ Initially, the question threw us off balance as the new concept was alien to us because we were limited in scope then. We went back and did research on the meaning and concept of the word and brought back our findings to him in the next class.

Weltanschauung is composed of two German words – welt meaning ‘world’ and Aushauung meaning  ‘view ‘ or ‘outlook’. It is a concept that is fundamental to German philosophy and epistemology. It is a wide world perception, the framework of ideas and beliefs, or a set of global descriptions. Through it, any individual or group, or culture watches and interprets the world and interacts with it. It is the prism through which we view the world for a unique experience and a better cognitive orientation of the world around us.

What is your Worldview about life?

Narrowing down to conquest or success in life, permit me to ask you. What is your weltanschauung? Or what is your worldview or outlook on life? What is your perception of life? What is your orientation about success? Or how do you interpret events as they unfold? One major challenge we face in life is our world outlook and our perception of challenges – the way we view challenges through the prism of life. It will either mar or make us. If our orientation about success is a negative one then every attempt we make at success will be futility. As much as possible we must change every negative world outlook and perception of adversity. Let us examine this scenario;

And they brought up an evil report of the land … saying, the land, through which we have gone to search, it is a land that eats up the inhabitants thereof, and all the people that we saw in it are men of great stature.
 And there we saw the giants, the sons of Anak which come of giants: and we were in our sights as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight, (Numbers 13:32, 33).

Maintain a Positive Worldview

In the face of challenges of adversity, you must develop a positive worldview or outlook. Developing a negative world outlook is calamitously dangerous and inimical to your conquest in adversity. All you can see is failure and impossibility. With such a negative worldview or outlook on life, it will be very difficult to succeed. They said, “In our own sight”, that is to say in their world outlook. The way they see adversity, they were not able. With this negative mindset, one becomes a victim of failure and defeat in life no matter the effort he or she puts in. A negative worldview breeds a negative mentality. In their own case, their negative worldview spiraled into the grasshopper mentality. They saw themselves as grasshopper before their opponents. In their own sight, they were like grasshoppers to the sons of Anak because they refused to awaken the giant in them. That was their orientation, their interpretation of the whole situation and it cost them their success in that particular mission. That is to say, your worldview whether positive or negative determines how you will fare in life.

A Choice Between Negative and Positive Worldview

 In every adversity, just like among the twelve spies, there are two dissenting voices that speak to our hearts based on our worldview. The voice of courage on one hand, and the voice of fear on the other hand. While Joshua and Caleb were saying “We are well able”, the other ten spies were singing” We are not able”. The voice of courage says you can do it, while the voice of fear says you are not able. The voice of fear exposes our stack inadequacies in the face of adversity. It tells us how helpless and deficient we are in adversity.  It is the voice of discouragement, the voice of impossibility.

But most, unfortunately, we tend to listen to the deafening voice of fear against the backdrop of the voice of courage because of the inclination of our worldview. Hence, in response to adversity, we always retort, ‘Oh am finished’, ‘am dead’,’ my whole life has come to an end’, and how did I find myself in this mess?’ ‘Or how can I come out of this trouble’. But to succeed in life we must hold a positive worldview about life. Holding a positive worldview lends credence to our pursuit of success. It is the ace we need to make our success a reality. Therefore you must change every negative outlook on life if you dream about success.

Be inspired, be determined, and dare to succeed.