A strange phrase, “Who Dares, Wins.” Some of you might recognize the motto of Britain’s main special forces unit, the S. A. S. One of the founders of the S. A. S. was a special cut of soldier. I remember reading that for one of their major operations, the early S.A. S. stole the equipment of another battalion that was not slated to be in action any time soon.
The level of danger, risk, and success that the S. A. S. has achieved over the years is legendary. So today we’re going to be talking about risk and motivation.
We all need motivation. And to be honest my motivation has been at an all time low for the last three months. I feel like I haven’t gotten anywhere with work or anything that could advance my quality of live. This is mainly from lukewarm options for new clients. I don’t hear back from most of them and places that I have put a profile on send me scam emails.
Over the last week, I’ve had conversation with people. And it’s struck me as odd that a lot of what I do and what I know is not common knowledge. I had forgotten that people have had different training, lives, and experiences. This was because I had retreated into the friend groups I appreciated most where my knowledge is more common.
However that doesn’t necessarily help anyone. Yes, it’s good to surround yourself with people who want to improve and who can connect with you. But you have to go beyond this comfort zone.
The risks of this are the most basic and terrifying of them all: Rejection and failure. If you keep grinding at something and there is no visible results, you’re going to get discouraged. I’ve been and I’m probably a little there right now. But this means you have to try something different.
It doesn’t mean you give up on that grind. It just means you take a small break from. I’ve gone through a number of different phases in this blog until I settled on trying to cover all aspects of life. I wanted to help people build a full understanding of their lives and the world around them.
For the past six months I feel I’ve been focusing entirely on trying to tie every blog post to some business related topic. Using all sorts of examples to varying degrees of success. And I think I forgot the side of things. Business and work isn’t everything despite it consuming a lot of my time and effort recently.
So I’m going to try to diversify my posts. Is there going to still be business themes? Yes. But I’m not going to try and make it all tied to business. Somethings lie beyond the scope of our job, and sometimes they are actually much more important than a job.
I fell into a trap that I warn other people about. The trap is hyper-focusing on one aspect of a situation. For me that was business in the blog and outside of the blog it was finding more work. As I got more and more demotivated I started looking in only a few places. I even went back to one that I really don’t like using despite it being the only place where I’ve had real success.
So I went back in my archives and I found a few places that I could try freelancing. And I’m going to the risk of putting more profiles and different jobs out there. The reason is I want to be in a greatly different and better place financially and even location wise within the next year.
I want to improve myself, my tools, and my access to things. In order to do that I need to take more risks. But I’m not going to take stupid risks. I’m going to maybe try a method that I think might not work. It has lower risk than others, but I still have written it off before trying it.
I’m also going to focus on trying to get more public speaking and training things done. Hopefully I’ll finally motivate myself to write and release some of the courses that I have had in my head. That way, I’ll finally be able to provide something that others might value because it has a price tag connected to it.
I appreciate everyone who reads these posts. Some have a lot more views than I expected, and I want to keep this free resource free. I will offer paid things connected to it, but that was always part of my intention with this project. However I view it like video games. The main game (this blog) is free. The extras like downloadable content (info products, training, etc.) is going to cost. but for the most part all you really need from here is free of charge.
If you want to go beyond the base game you can buy more. But you don’t necessarily need to. Those things are the premium things you get if you want to take your experience to the next level. Or you can take it to the next level by trying them out and practicing them on your own.
So switch it up sometimes. Your lack of motivation could just your internal warning of a need to take a break and try something new.
Think about it.
Sincerely,
The Irreverent Gentleman
gentlemansuniversityofmanliness 