What does it say about my life if my biggest motivation is a dog?

By David McElroy · November 7, 2017

I had a disturbing realization Sunday. I have no motivation right now.

I was reading a book which lays out a detailed plan for achieving success in a particular business field. It’s something I’ve recently started pursuing with the encouragement of a friend who’s in the business. I should be able to make a lot of money doing it. But the writer brought up a foundational question: Why are you doing this? What’s your motivation?

That’s when it hit me that I haven’t had any motivation for years. I’ve had brief periods during which I started feeling motivated — only to have it fade immediately when a woman left my life. That’s when I realized the obvious. I feel no motivation when I’m alone.

I haven’t had anyone in my life who I wanted to achieve things for — and I seem to be as weak without that as Samson was without his hair.

When I had a health scare almost two years ago — when I was diagnosed with blood clots in my lungs — there was a big clue for me about this. I have vivid memories of getting ready to drive myself to a hospital emergency room that Sunday night. It’s a surreal feeling to sit on your bed to put shoes on and wonder whether you’ll come home — to fear you might be about to die.

I remember looking at Lucy and realizing that she was the only reason I had to come back home. The cats could have been fine for days and they might not notice I was gone. (All of my current cats were feral and they aren’t that attached to me, unlike many in the past.)

But Lucy loved me. She adored me. She needed me.

In a very real way, Lucy was my biggest reason to want to live and return home. She was my motivation.

In his early 20th century motivational book, “Think and Grow Rich,” Napoleon Hill wrote of how useless money is to men without the proper motivation.

“The men who have accumulated great fortunes and achieved outstanding recognition in literature, art, industry, architecture, and the professions, were motivated by the influence of a woman,” Hill wrote. “Take women out of their lives, and great wealth would be useless to most men. It is this inherent desire of man to please woman, which gives woman the power to make or break a man.”

I suspect Hill was basically right, but I would slightly expand what he said. For me, the motivation is a woman and a family. It’s the desire to be something — to do something, to create something — for a wife and children.

For me, it’s not about the money. It’s the desire to give something to a family — and for them to love me, adore me and need me. Just as much as Lucy does now.

As I’ve said before, I have a burning need to be able to make good things for somebody and to be able to take them to her and say, “I made this because of you.”

I could do pretty much anything in life which I wanted to do. That might sound prideful, but I’m not going to bother with false humility here. When I was young, I had the intelligence and talent to achieve whatever interested me most. For a combination of reasons, I made choices that haven’t yet allowed me to achieve the things I had intended.

I had some success. I was managing editor of a daily newspaper when I was still 21. I started publications that were very good when I was still young. I became a very successful political consultant. I made a successful short film that made it into 20 film festivals on my first attempt. I could have used any of those as a springboard to something big, but I didn’t. (The reasons why I didn’t aren’t worth exploring here. Health was a hidden issue for a long time. Then divorce left me alone.)

So now I’m starting down a new path that has the potential to make me wealthy. I look at the people I’ve observed who are already quite successful in the field and I realize I was given more natural ability than they were born with. So I should be able to be wildly successful.

Maybe. Maybe not.

I’m capable of doing some big things. I’m capable of making a lot of money. I’m capable of creating great things to give to my wife and children.

But right now, I have no motivation.

I’m cautiously optimistic about the business venture I’m starting to pursue. I’m still optimistic about making art that can be popular and profitable. I’m still aware of what could be.

But I have to find motivation somewhere if I’m actually going to do anything. I know they tell me I should be motivated from within instead, but I know my history. I know what I need.

In the meantime, I’m grateful to have Lucy. She needs me. She adores me. She’s happy to have any attention I’ll give her.

But as much as I love the World’s Happiest Dog®, I need bigger motivation if I ever hope to do any of the things that matter to me most. I’m never going to be what I’m capable of becoming without the right woman. I hate admitting that, but it’s true.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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