Fire in Your Belly Friday - a daily message of Inspiration and Gratitude

Good morning LinkedIn Connections!

Yes I know the title “Fire in Your Belly Friday” perhaps doesn’t make sense since today is Saturday. However, some great and some horrible things happened to me yesterday. I’ll admit to you, when I was motivated to start my “Daily message of inspiration and gratitude” I went through and mapped out the titles of each days message for a 5 week period in advance. I felt like it was necessary to have the title of each day already mapped for numerous reasons, including:

a.      Hold myself accountable – Motivate and provide drive for me to share a message every day. It would be easier to hold myself accountable by including the link to each days message after I had posted it. Sometimes there is nothing more motivating (for me anyway) than promises made to yourself you haven’t kept!

b.      Help me be more efficient – numerous titles easily poured out of me, but it didn’t fill up all 5 weeks. So I went to a writers best friend the Thesaurus, and searched terms like inspiration and numerous others to find words that inspired me and gave me ideas for a message I could get behind!

c.      Conserve energy – for some of us (there are some Super Heroes out there which this doesn’t apply to) there is a “finite amount” of energy we have available each day. Planning ahead would allow me to focus all energy on the content of the message versus what the message should be. I knew there would be days I wouldn’t have the energy for both.

d.      Strike while the iron is hot – when we have moments that inspire us, I believe we need to “Seize the moment” which in Latin translates to “Carpe momentum temporis”. Notice the last part of the translation “temporis”? I’m sure you easily deduced that means “temporary”. Inspirational moments like this are often temporary, unfortunately. If you don’t seize the moment, chances are you never will.

e.      A map for each days content – I have my own little treasure trove of inspirational quotes, articles, and video links I collect to keep me going. Having each days message already mapped allowed me to plan for what I could use from my treasure trove and conserve more energy (as described above)!  

Let me tell you LinkedIn, it’s a good thing I had already mapped everything out because yesterday my entire day was derailed and I was not feeling inspired in the least bit for the majority of the day. Even when I found inspiration, it was just enough to get me through the day (not enough Fire in the Belly to write this message)!   

As I woke up this morning and opened up my plan to see what my message of the day was going to be, I didn’t like that I had to skip Friday. I needed to hold myself accountable to make up for my much needed day of rest. I also questioned what I could speak about for the message title “Fire in You Belly”.

I turned to the greatest resource I believe mankind has ever created, Google. Creativity is hard sometimes for even the most creative people (not saying I’m the most creative person). Sometimes we all need a little help. Thank you Google for making my job easier this morning!

My plan for Day 5 of my daily message of Inspiration and Gratitude titled Fire in Your Belly Friday (created and posted on Saturday) was going to utilize the lyrics for a song by Van Morrison as the content of this message! However, as I started looking up the definitions about the meaning of “Fire in the Belly”, all I could think about was a man I saw on YouTube that inspired me to be the man I am today (a different man than I was when I saw the video), and the man I aspire to be in the future: David Goggins!

First off I’d like to start with the definitions that made me even think of David Goggins. I wanted to know how “Fire in the Belly” was defined?

1)     Per Cambridge Dictionary, it is “a strong determination to succeed”.

2)     According to the De-Facto Gospel that is Wikipedia, it is “The emotional stamina and vigor, passion, or inner drive to achieve something, to take action”.

3)     Finally, according to Collins Dictionary, “If you say that someone has fire in their belly, you are expressing approval of them because they are energetic, enthusiastic, and have very strong feelings.”

Ironically, one of my LinkedIn Connections last night shared an Audiobook with me that is the story of David Goggins, which I can’t wait to listen to. After looking up the above definitions, I asked myself “Shawn, how can you read the definitions above, and not immediately think of David Goggins?”. This is the full YouTube Video I was so inspired by, that I posted these messages on Social Media months ago:

• LinkedIn
• Facebook

I think this todays message of inspiration and gratitude is going to be short, sweet, and to the point. If you aren’t inspired by the links I’ve shared with you…I’m not sure if there is anything that can (definitely not me). My gratitude goes out completely to my LinkedIn Connection Elliot Dobner for helping me remember the start of my journey, and more importantly David Goggins for allowing me to feel there is “enough said” already. Thank you David Goggins for making my job easy today, and more importantly for making me into the man I am and aspire to be!

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