Excessive Motivation... A Form of Frustration

For more than twenty years, while attending conferences and forums, I have seen many success stories headline the stage. Over time, the years have taught me that time is part of the definition of success; so do not believe every success at the moment it appears, and do not judge your failure at the moment you stumble.

For more than twenty years, as I attended conferences and forums, many success stories passed before me: names headlines on stages, companies presented as the success story of the era, and experiences we heard about as if their founders had unlocked a secret no one else knew. And with every period comes a new story.

Then the years pass, and I look back in memory at some of those names and ask: Where are they now? Some continued and grew even more successful, and that deserves respect. But many of these stories vanished, and some successes that seemed extraordinary were not quite as they appeared back then.

Do not believe every success at the moment it appears, and do not judge your failure at the moment you stumble.

What prompted me to write is not the successful ones, but those who labor under the weight of life and work, only to look around and feel that everyone is advancing except them; an employee returns exhausted to find someone celebrating a promotion, or an entrepreneur who has been trying for years reads about a company achieving in months what he hasn't achieved in years.

And slowly, the question begins: What am I missing? Here, excessive motivation—unintentionally—turns into a form of frustration. We tell people: "You can do anything," "Nothing is impossible," and "Success is a decision." But life simply does not work that way.

The problem with the message "You can do anything" is that it can transform in the mind into a harsh question: If I can, why haven't I succeeded yet? Thus, motivation turns from a source of energy into a source of feeling inadequate.

You may work hard and not succeed, you may make a good decision and get a bad result, you may possess competence yet the opportunity doesn't arrive on time, and you may be delayed for years—not because you are less than others, but because some things require their own time, circumstances, and maturity.

Part of the problem is that we compare our entire life to a single selected moment from someone else's life. We see the announcement, not the years that preceded it; the deal, not what happened after it; the stage, not what occurs when the lights go out. We see the success without knowing its cost or sustainability.

Light is not proof of success, and the absence of light is not proof of failure.

In management, I see the same pattern. When we place an employee before unrealistic goals, limited resources, and incomplete authority, and then demand more enthusiasm, we are not motivating them; we are holding them responsible for a system-created failure. And when we tell an entrepreneur that failure is merely a choice, we ignore the market, timing, capital, and competition.

Real motivation does not deny reality; it doesn't promise that you will succeed, but rather makes you more capable of succeeding. It doesn't tell you that you can do everything, but helps you discover what you can do, what you need to learn, when to persist, and when to change course. Hope strengthens you against reality, whereas illusion makes you blame yourself when you crash into it.

So, if you are working in silence while others command the spotlight, do not rush to judge yourself. After twenty years of watching stories appear and fade, I have come to believe that time is far more just than stages. The stage tells you who showed up today; time tells you who was genuine. And the quality of thinking precedes the quality of results.

mohammed bin saleh