Daniel Bryan On Lack Of Motivation And Ambition

Daniel Bryan was recently a guest on the Why Not Now? podcast with Amy Jo Martin (transcript via wrestlinginc.com). During the interview, he spoke about his lack of motivation. Here is what he had to say:

“Despite what it sounds like, I’m not very motivated, right?” Bryan reflected, “I’m very much somebody who just accepts things as they come for the most part. So in wrestling, I was getting very popular and the WWE still didn’t want to push me to the top level because of my size. I’m a smaller guy. A normal person looks at me, when I’m coming down the ramp to the ring, a normal person doesn’t gravitate to looking at me unlike a John Cena who is enormous or some of the bigger guys like a Hulk Hogan, or a Steve Austin, or The Rock, who as soon as they come down, it’s like, ‘wow! Look at that guy,’ right? And that’s what WWE typically wants in their top stars and I’ve never been very good at being like, ‘hey, you guys should do more with me’ or ‘you guys should do this or do that with me’. I’ve never been someone who is motivated by that or pushes himself towards that, or pushes myself towards financial goals, or pushing myself towards anything other than what I love to do. And I’m constantly having to remind myself, like, ‘hey, if you want to get to the next level where I want to be, you do have to do some pushing here.’ And so yeah, that’s a constant thing that I struggle with. WWE did this personality test with some of their more successful wrestlers to see, like, ‘are there some common traits amongst these people that makes them successful, so when we are recruiting people we can look for these traits to make them more successful.” Bryan remembered “and so, they ask you all these questions, yada, yada, yada. I got my test results back and the lady was just baffled. She was like, ‘you have the lowest ambition score I have ever seen!’ In percentiles, I was in the bottom one percentile for ambition. And she was like, ‘how on Earth are you successful at this?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know – I just really love to wrestle.’ So yeah, I have to push myself sometimes to be more ambitious.”