What Gets You Out of Bed Every Day?

Have you ever thought about what you work for, what it is that gets you out of bed every day, what kind of motivation pushes you to do more on mornings before the sun has risen, while pacing the deserted streets of the city in pitch darkness?

Muhammad Ali is one of the greatest thought leaders and athletes of the 20th century, one of the names written into history in letters of gold. If you’ve ever come across one of his interviews or speeches, or read a quote of his somewhere, you’ll have realized it’s impossible not to be moved by his endless, inexhaustible fury, ambition, perseverance and determination.

In one interview, Ali said, “I ask God to give me strength not for money and fame, but for my Black brothers who sleep on concrete, who are forced to live among rats and who are seen as nothing more than slaves.” Likewise, what do you think Martin Luther King was thinking as he addressed hundreds of thousands of Black citizens in Washington, at the Lincoln Memorial that symbolizes tolerance, integrity and determination, saying “I have a dream”, or Marie Curie, exposed to radiation for years in the name of human progress, as she carried out experiments at the cost of her life?

Say, fighting at a barricade
Say, setting out to explore the North Pole
Say, testing a serum in your veins, would it be shameful to die?
Nazım Hikmet Ran

The road humankind has set out on in the 21st century to find its purpose in life, its search for meaning, is perhaps one of the most tangled, most never-ending syndromes and paradoxes of all time. Having climbed to the very top of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs over the last 100 years far faster than sending rockets to the moon, humankind is now, well beyond the words Neil Armstrong spoke as he took the first step on the moon in 1969, “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind”, chasing the dream of taking life to other planets. Yet amid all this progress, with the unbearable lightness of easing the torment of never quite finding the answer it seeks, it doesn’t seem to have strayed very far from Montaigne’s words of 500 years ago: “no wind serves him who addresses his voyage to no certain port.”

“The one who loves his country most is the one who does his duty best.” Mustafa Kemal Atatürk

We carry on our lives with the hollow comfort of herd psychology, no different from the lives of birds spent migrating, dragged along by the turning of the seasons. Beyond years chasing one another, beyond the Fridays and Sundays that suddenly arrive while we’re still wondering how the week will go, we realize we’ve grown old, that we’ve aged, through a faint, barely-there reflection in the window of a neighborhood diner.

As someone who believes he owes a debt to these lands, to this country, and that he can repay that debt by doing his duty as well as he can, I find my own purpose in life, in line with my abilities and goals, in the ideal of building a world brand out of these lands. This is the motivation that gets me out of bed every day, and that keeps me working without pause, weekday or weekend, in the dead of night or at the crack of dawn. The feeling of belonging to a whole, to a purpose higher than the individual or the individualistic, to an emotion more intense than a whim or even a passion.

What gets you out of bed every day to do more?

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