Does Success Motivation, Motivational Speaking and Self-help Stuff Really Work? Is Greatness and Human Potential Real?

I have a love and hate relationship with motivational speaking. One thing for sure, motivation is extremely important for humans but certain people who do motivational speaking confuse motivational speaking with misleading people into thinking that they can do the "impossible." Some motivational speakers also excel at telling people what they can do, or what they are but in very vague ways to a point where people will start believing in things that they will never be able to do or will struggle in actually doing. A pastor friend of mine agreed with me that many times, motivational speeches and sermons pump people up and people leave the semorns and seminars hyperexcited and supermotivated but soon get start because they fail to find out exactly what they must do and how to achieve those things that they are motivated for.

Success motivation and self-help stuff is important and key to increase human success, happiness, achievement and wellbeing, but the same stuff, poorly understood and misused can be very detrimental to the same success, happiness, achievement and wellbeing.

I have been there before and I talk about this from practical experience. When I left Africa and went to the UK to do my masters and briefly worked and stayed there after completing my Master of Science studies, I delved deep into motivational and self-help material from books, live seminars, audios, videos and website material. I was a very high academic achiever by my own standards, now I wanted to find out how to be a high achiever in other areas of life like career, financial, social and profession. I have always believed that most answers to life's problems already exist somewhere and most of it is in books and in other people. But I have also always been a learner of many different knowledges from books, other people, videos, audios anywhere I can get some knew knowledge and ideas.

Many people still do not understand what exactly I do. But you see, I think I have a natural instinct to help other people solve their problems, achieve their goals and become their best possible selves. So I later realised that my primary learning motivation was so that I can have knowledge, ideas and solutions to help others as individuals, teams and organisations in different areas like personal, business, environmental, economic, careers, and professions.

When I returned to Zimbabwe I went into consulting, training, education and development. I was getting some inspiration from the "motivational books" and I was pumped up having discovered major differences between Africa and Europe. That time, I literally believed everything that my motivational speakers and self-help gurus said about success, happiness, achievement and wellbeing. You see things like;

1. You can be anything that you want to be
2. To succeed you must be this or have this or do this-this is what I know call "The one thinking myth."
3. The environment does not have any impact on your success
4. You are born great
5. All you need to do is visualise success
6. All people are so ambitious that they are seeking ways to me more successful than they are
7. Small and medium business are small because they lack opportunities and resources to grow
8. The corporate world is the epicentre of high achievement, high ambitious, high performance and excellence.
9. Marketing and sales people are the most ambitious and motivated people and are always seeking to be more successful in their marketing and sales
10. Highly educated people and people in positions of top leadership have high integrity and have desire to produce their best possible performance and results.
11. All successful people in business and leadership are fair, empathetic and honest.
12. Europe and Africa are the same in their thinking and behaviours

When you learn things and apply them you get the reality. I tried to a lot of the things and used a lot in my own work and they did not produce the results that I expected. When I started interacting with people in business and the corporate world I discovered that most of the beliefs I had, shaped my motivational and self-help stuff did not apply in my continent and country.

Latter, in one of my readings and learnings, I discovered some statistics that sobered me up about self-help and success motivation staff.

1. More than 80% of people who use self-help and success motivation do not succeed by using the self-help and success motivation stuff.
2. People are generally apathetic, they settle for whatever life gives them.
3. People, including leaders, managers and top decision-makers in business and the corporate world are not different from the rest of society in the achievement drive, motivation and desire for constant increase in results and improvement in transformation.
4. There is no such thing as the one thing you need to be highly successful. It is always a combination of factors.
5. Some motivational speakers and experts do not have a clue about how to help people to achieve more success or to become or have what they motivate their motivatees to be, do or have. They sell them dummies. Motivation is important, but motivation alone leaders nowhere. People need more than motivation to actual success and achieve what they are motivated to do.
6. What is often called motivation is not motivation, it is inspiration or encouragement. Real motivation is science. So many of these motivational speakers must be called inspirational speakers.

Lessons and Observations

1. Success motivation and self help stuff helps, but it must not be a replacement of ground realities.
2. Success motivation is important, but more important is information, strategy and skills. In fact, success motivation must be used together ambition, strategy, skills and practical solutions.
3. If you are not careful, success motivation completely take you out of the real world where things happen. It can become a purely mental thing where you expect to achieve goals, solve problems, manifest dreams and change situations through mystery and miracle without any conscious real world action to manifest the dreams, solve the problems or achieve the goals.
4. Some of the things that work in one country or continent do not apply to other continents.
5. Useful and responsible success motivation must be based on reality and backed by strategy. It must not delude the motivatees into thinking that they can achieve what is clearly not achievable.
6. A lot of motivational speakers speak sense, but they provide only part of the whole issue success. They can, for example inspire people to greatness even when they have not thought through what they mean by greatness and also real strategies for connect with that greatness and live it.

Personal greatness is real.

It is a pity that many motivational speakers preach it but lack the knowhow to help people define, discover and enjoy it. I will say more about this latter.

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©Simon Bere, 2024