Personal Motivation

Personal Motivation Paper

February 27, 2012

Personal Motivation Paper

I believe you cannot succeed without motivation. Motivation is the force that keeps us going and does not allow us to hold back in realizing our dreams. Will Smith once said, “In my mind, I’ve always been an ‘A-list’ Hollywood superstar. Y’all just didn’t know yet.” You have to see it in your mind before it will ever become real. Once you are convinced of your success, it becomes easier to plan and position your career for success.

In my career, I have had both moments of being motivated and excited as well as moments of being demotivated. I will be discussing both situations in this paper, starting with a motivational situation that taught me a lesson that I still use today. Some time ago, when I was a software engineer, I had this idea of doubling the power on an Ethernet cable. Since I was a software engineer, I needed to understand this from a hardware perspective. I reached out to the hardware engineering team. Together we brainstormed on this idea and came up with a technical plan which included both the software and hardware aspects. Now we needed management to buy into our idea and invest in it. We setup a meeting with the upper management to showcase our idea. We prepared for this presentation as if our careers depended on it. We read books and articles on presenting to decision makers. We reviewed our presentation several times to ensure we have no spelling or grammatical mistakes as well as checking the font size and color scheme to ensure that it looks good on a screen. Our team of 3 engineers was asked to present this idea to 5 executives. Jeff was the senior executive in this team as well as the key decision maker.

On the day of the presentation, we started exactly as we had prepared. After 2 minutes into the presentation Jeff stopped us and said “Guys you are doing it all wrong.” We were stumped and clueless as to what went wrong. Jeff then explained that...