Book Excerpts

Find Your Motivation

Effective leaders should have motivation and a motivation. Effective leaders should be able to identify ways to motivate those around them and know those individuals well enough to know what their motivations are. Motivation to act or accomplish something can come from wanting to provide for one’s family, be a hero to one’s child, earn respect, prove something to naysayers, make the world better, serve as a role model, or get a chip off one’s shoulder.
           
There are many reasons for leaders to do what they do and I suspect many times more reasons why those around leaders do what they do. Either way, if one is not motivated or has a lack of motivation, that individual will not be successful in the long term. Here are some motivators that have worked for me among others you will glean from the rest of this book.

Get It Done

My academic and professional paths have been guided by several principles. Sometimes those principles seem to be in conflict or at least not complementary of each other. However, each principle has a focus on getting me to the other side of whatever the goal is at that point in my life. “Get it done” is one of those principles that I have used to power through tough and arduous long-term goals and situations. I grew up believing that people can do anything they desire to do with enough training, effort, creativity, opportunity, faith, and a little luck. The “Get it Done” mentality aligns with this expectation of succeeding if the goal is truly something desired and the price is worth the reward of achieving it. This sentiment is demonstrated in the success of many who should not have done as well as they did, like Donald Trump winning the Presidency in 2016 or Chief Engineer Scotty always getting the engines or torpedoes working just as all seemed hopeless for the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek.

Losing Elections

I haven’t always been a leader, but I have always been Shawn. Whether it was playing school with my friends after school at home or helping set the rules for street baseball, I showed leadership potential and took advantage of opportunities that presented themselves for me to demonstrate what I could do. Since around third grade when my Dad brought home some discarded textbooks and student desks and in the sixth grade when I got ahold of outdated student assessment forms, I wanted to be a teacher (the ultimate leader and change maker). I went so far as to assess my sixth-grade classmates and distribute my assessments of them on those forms (their parents were not happy with me or my teacher).