Own Your Own Fear: Motivation – Part 6
What motivates us to do things?
Is it money, fear of failure, greed, love, danger, reward or selflessness?
Whatever it is, it is usually personal to us and is not shared unless you are in a team, a family or other cohesive group and even then those in such groups may not be motivated in the same manner.
Often we are motivated by fear of failure.
At an event that I ran with the rock band Magnum, I was sat at home having my tea on a Saturday evening three hours before opening the doors, when I received a phone call from the lighting manager at the venue who said,
“Get down here now, you are not going to believe this.”
I rushed out of the house and drove at breakneck speed down to the venue. As I arrived all of the staff, crew and band operatives were outside sitting on the picnic table around the edge of the venue.
As I approached they all cheered and the duty manager said,
“Let’s see you get out of this one” – a red rag to a bull.
I entered the venue and opened the door to the hall. There were millions of big black flies circulating in the room and the larger hall in swarms, it was totally disgusting. There were piles of dead flies on the floor.
I left the building and with my giant mobile phone and I rang the Environmental Health Officer on his private line explaining the problem.
Normally he would not have come out but he was fascinated by the issue and fifteen minutes later he appeared with pest control in tow. They entered the building and he came out rolling his eyes. “Not seen anything like this before”. “Can you do anything about it?” I said, desperate to go ahead with the show as it was sold out.
This was my motivation, the fear of failure.
Pest control sprayed the two halls and the drains and one hour later we were sweeping huge piles of flies out of the doors. We put doors back an hour and we were ready to go just over one hour late. How had this happened?
Well, four weeks previously, we had a huge Indian wedding in the main hall with lots of Indian food. At the end of the night they had poured their curry down the drains outside that are used for flood run off.
Three weeks later we had a fishing show and competition run from the hall and the local river. At the end of the day some of the maggots were poured down the same drains. What had then happened is that the maggots had fed off the curry and had morphed into full-blown flies which had emerged through the vents and into the venue.
A totally wicked problem, which we solved.
It was a great night and I often look at this as a lesson well learned.
#OwnYourOwnFear #Motivation #venuemanagement
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