What motivates you?

For some time now I’ve wanted to share with others my personal experiences in career, sports, life, thinking and thanks to my husband’s motto: “never delay what you want to do in life”, I finally sat down to write my inaugural blog.  Just in time to kick off one of the resolutions I have on my 2019 list. Have you made your resolution list yet?
This piece will center on motivation-the biggest and strongest drive in my life.
It was this year that my friend, Dr. Sertan Kabadayi, invited me to speak at Fordham University at their “Industry career speakers series”. In preparation for my speech, I reflected on the many aspects of my career. While I will share in future blogs more about some of those reflections, for this one I wanted to focus on motivation. It was the end of my speech at Fordham, during the Q&A session, that one of the students asked me “what motivates you?”. The question struck me as I wasn’t expecting it based on the topic of international careers. Without much thought, I replied, “success motivates me.”
I realized success is just a term I give to different outcomes I achieve in different circumstances. In sports it’s easy, you become the champion and that is a clear success. How about the runner ups? Don’t they feel successful? Often in sports I felt unsuccessful when I lost a tennis match to an opponent that I thought I could beat. But when faced with opponents much better than me then even winning a few games would make me happy and again that was a motivation for me. In this case, failures are secret successes; in these situations I excelled compared to what I perceived I could have achieve.
 When this thinking is applied to day-to-day business life it’s often a more complicated story. On a daily basis at work it’s hard to find a success story; a business place can be an environment hard to define what success truly looks like. It could be even more failures than successes given the circumstances. For this I set long term goals, long term successes that I can achieve over time and work towards. That motivates me.
 Million-dollar Manhattan Condo as motivation?
Whether its success, giving, sharing, health, happiness, a nice Bentley car, million dollar Manhattan condo on the 5th  avenue or an expensive Bordeaux wine , it’s important to find what motivates you. I have secretly found what it is for me with a question that came out of the blue and mine is ‘feeling successful’. I find motivation and hope directly correlated leading to positive thinking and driving stellar outcomes for one’s self.
Maybe this is a moment to think what motivates you? And if you are one of the lucky ones that identified it you already have the power in you.