My new article on UniversalUSA "What Ignites you?" Take a look: It’s 5:25 on a cold winter morning. You only got 3 hours of sleep because you were working late at your second job. You know once that blanket comes off, the cold air is going to rush upon you like a shark that smells blood. Why get up? What makes you wipe the crust out of your eyes, go outside in the cold and drive 20 minutes to do cardio in a dark, vacant gym? What ignites that fire under your ass, the one that says, “I don’t give a damn how cold it is. I don’t give a damn what time it is. I’m doing what’s expected of me”? What motivates you? For me, the motivation is both internal and external. Sure, I can give you a generic answer like every other aspiring athlete and say, “I just want to be the best person I can be. I want to outdo my last show. I want to progress significantly from year to year.” Yes, these statements are true. They better be or I might as well just go back to bed. My motivation is much deeper and more complex than just being the best I can be. This alone will not pay the bills. This alone will not allow me to sit down at my kitchen table and tell my wife, “You don’t have to work anymore.” I’ve been an athlete all my life. I played baseball, football, and wrestled. I played on the Varsity squad most years for these sports. The difference with bodybuilding and these sports is the fact that I never looked at these sports as a future profession. Yeah, I wanted to play for the Yankees but truthfully, what kid doesn’t have that dream? I was good but I was never the talk of the town. I never had my name in the paper. I never got recruited by colleges. But this isn’t a sob story about how I was the odd man out and didn’t make it. This is a story about how I learned to think like an underdog. There are three types of people in this world that externally motivate me to not only train hard, remain on diet, work two jobs to support my lifestyle and always focusing on my dreams – my team, the doubters, and people who don’t notice me at all. My team is the reason I carry on with this rugged, time consuming, and intense lifestyle. My team consists of my wife, family, friends, training partners and everyone at Universal Nutrition. My team motivates me to wake up every morning to eat my food and smash the weights. These are the people that help cook my food, that train with me, give me words of encouragement and inspire me. Without them, I wouldn’t be who I am today or the champion I will be tomorrow. People always talk about “visualizing yourself doing well and you will do well”. In that movie, the trainer Mickey Goldmill tells Rocky, “You see yourself doing right and then you do right.” The difference is when I visualize, I see myself winning. And what I picture in my mind is my team taking up an entire section at a pro qualifier and then exploding in celebration when the announcer calls out: “And the 1st place trophy and the overall title goes to…Gary Turner.” On the flip side, there are many people who think they won’t or can’t do something. I don’t know if it’s an internal problem on their part or they just can’t cope with the fact that others are trying to make something of themselves. Hell, I’m sure there are people that read the ending of the last paragraph, laughing at my confidence and thinking, “This kid is dreaming. It’s a pipe dream. He’s not going to make it anywhere.” Truth be told, if no one is laughing at your dreams, you haven’t set them high enough. These doubters are everywhere – in your gym, on internet forums, at your job, maybe even at home. What you need to do is use them as fuel to make yourself into a bigger, better bodybuilder. You need a healthy dose of the “I will show all them” attitude. Nothing would make a doubter happier than to see me fail and nothing would make me happier than to prove that doubter wrong. With all the doubters out there, I live with the mindset of an underdog. I will scratch and crawl and work toward my goal despite how much everyone says it’s impossible. I’m going to make a career out of proving the doubters wrong and if you’re someone doubting me, you’re next on my list. In addition to the doubters, I run into people who don’t care whether I fail or succeed, rise or fall. They don’t even notice my physique when I walk past them. I don’t mean when I’m in the bread aisle of the food store and the 65 year old lady on her Sunday shopping spree doesn’t notice me. I’m referring to the years and years of bodybuilding shows, group gym sessions, seminars, and expos that I’ve attended where I wasn’t noticed by a supplement company, a judge, a promoter or anyone who can help me progress my career. I was swept aside like debris. Was it the fact that I simply wasn’t ready for that sort of grandeur? I thought so until I saw many athletes get hooked up with photo shoots, video shoots, magazine articles and exposure to a country whose marketing relies and operates heavily on social media. Their popularity rose but one fact was true: When it came time to compete, many of these “overnight superstars” not only placed lower than I did, they got smoked. I am not complaining by any means and I’m not taking anything away from any athletes, this is simply a depiction of what I think and visualize as an underdog when I train and live this lifestyle. This is what lights a fire under my ass. This is what motivates me. Motivation comes in all forms. It can be from a speech, a person, an event or even a Youtube video. It can come from within or without. It can come from positive or negative sources. One thing is for sure when it comes to motivation: Whatever you want to do in life, whether it’s becoming a CEO of a company, a professional athlete or a world class novelist, you are going to need to be motivated. You’re going to need a sense of urgency and if you don’t, you better find it. Because if you don’t, this is going to be a rougher journey than it already is. So trust me when I say it’s already rough enough, so wake up, get up and start accomplishing something. -Gsix
Posted on: Mon, 07 Oct 2013 13:00:36 +0000
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