How to Catch Wild Pigs: Awareness Anonymous 5-Step Recovery Program

Do you know how to catch wild pigs?

We’ll get to that in a minute.

There are a lot of motivational speakers out there that preach and sell false hope. I know because I’m a reformed motivational junkie myself. I’ve attended countless seminars, invested thousands of dollars in tapes, CDs and DVDs. I have an extensive library of books that remain my greatest possessions, including my leather-bound journals which date back to 1983. I can tell you this with certainty, there are only a handful of motivational speakers and authors of which I’m aware who really care about you and me.

I share this because I continue to watch friends and colleagues get mesmerized by the sirens of “Get Rich Quick” spellbinders who have only one mission in life, for themselves to get rich quick… and a lot of them do, at our expense! Meanwhile, my friends and colleagues leave the seminars and finish the books and recordings wondering “What now? What next?” with less money and less hope than when they first arrived. It’s shameful. This is my rant of the day. But I never rant without a possible solution.

What can we do about it? We can form our own organization that helps motivational junkies like me promote Awareness, anonymously, by “carrying its message” to the suffering “unaware.” I call it Awareness Anonymous. It’s not for people who want to stop drinking, it’s for people who want to start thinking. Here’s the 5-Step Recovery Program.

1. We admit we want more out of life.

2. We believe we have unlimited power if we just figure out how to tap into it.

3. We make a decision to pay more attention to things and people that matter.

4. We take inventory of our passion and we start doing something NOW to share it and reveal it with others.

5. Having had a wake-up call as the result of these steps, we try to carry this message to the hopeless and downtrodden and to practice these principles in our daily lives.

Unfortunately, many people look for the easy way. Why not? They’ve been conditioned to believe there’s an easy way for everything — just Google it! But you and I both know there’s no easy way in life. Success comes from hard work and sacrifice, not from a seminar on “getting rich quick.” There’s no free lunch.

You pay a price for failure. You pay a price for success. And you pay a price for indifference and inaction.

This reminds me of a story which brings us back to catching wild pigs.

You catch wild pigs by finding a suitable place in the woods and putting corn on the ground. The pigs find it and begin to come everyday to eat their “free” corn. When they’re used to coming every day, you put some 2X4’s down one side of the place with fencing laying on the ground where they’re used to visiting. When they become comfortable with the fence, they begin to eat the corn again and you put up another side of the fence.

They get used to that and start to eat, again you continue until you have all four sides of the fence up with a gate in the last side. The wild pigs, who are used to the free corn, start to come through the gate to eat, and then you slam the gate shut, catching the whole herd.

Suddenly the wild pigs have lost their freedom. They run around and around inside the fence in chaos, but they’re trapped. But soon they go back to eating the free corn. They’re so used to it that they’ve forgotten how to forage in the woods for themselves, so they accept their captivity.

There’s no free lunch.

Find your mentor, guru or motivational speaker with great care. If they sell you on more sizzle than steak and you find yourself enjoying their “free” content, eBooks, or messages of any kind, remember the story of the wild pigs. They may be laying down the fence to trap you in a shameless way.

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Hey there, I’m Michael, I’m a dad, writer, sales & marketing consultant, recruiter, life-long learner… oh and passionate Growler too. You can learn more about my services by visiting LinkedIn, and crawl into my stories right here on Medium.com.

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