Motivation and Success

Extracts from 'Williams driven by a deeper purpose' by Matthew Syed in The Times of February 1, 2017 (p. 60)

We are motivated to do amazing things not when we are within our comfort zone, but when we seek a wider purpose, often (but not always) discovered in adversity. As Orson Welles put it in the Third Man: "In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had fiver hundred years of democracy and peace - and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." 

As Frankl put it: "Success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one's personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself."

Read the full article here.