1. Get on your deathbed
Without being conscious of death, you can't be fully aware of the gift of life
2. Stay hungry
"What you do is create a vision of who you want to be, and then live into that picture as if it were already true."
3. Tell yourself a true lie
Think up some stories about who you would like to be Without a picture of your highest self, you can't live into that self. Fake it till you make it. The lie will become the truth.
4. Keep your eyes on the prize
Most of us tend to lose our focus in life because we're perpetually worried about so many negative possibilities. Rather than focusing on our goals, we are distracted by our worries and fears. But when you focus on what you want, it will come into your life.
5. Learn to sweat in peace
The more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed in war. Whenever I'm afraid of something coming up, I will find a way to do something that's even harder or scarier. Once I do the harder thing, the real thing becomes fun.
6. Simplify your life
The most simplified time management system: Do everything right on the spot—don't put anything unnecessarily into your future. Do it now, so that the future is always wide open.
When you simplify your life, it gathers focus. The more you can focus your life, the more motivated it gets.
7. Look for the lost gold
When I am happy, I see the happiness in others. But when I am angry, I see other people as unnecessarily testy. When I am weary, I see the world as boring and unattractive. That's because we don't see things as they are, we see things as we are.
Opportunity is life's gold. It's all you need to be happy.
8. Push all your own buttons
Make a note of everything that inspires you. That's your control panel. Those buttons operate your whole system of personal motivation. Go through all of your music and create a "greatest motivational hits" tape for yourself. Use the movies, too.
9. Build a track record
It's not what we do that makes us tired—it's what we don't do. The tasks we don't complete cause the most fatigue.
Stop worrying about what you think of yourself and start building a track record that proves that you can motivate yourself to do whatever you want to do.
The more things you wrote down, the more confident you became that you was truly becoming a finisher. And you had a notebook to prove it.
10. Welcome the unexpected
Creativity has nothing to do with originality—it has everything to do with being unexpected. You don't have to be original to be creative. In fact, it sometimes helps to realize that no one is original.
11. Find your master key
Find books on how to make your life work. It's your own master key.
12. Put your library on wheels
You can use your time on the road (your drive time) to educate and motivate yourself at the same time (using audiobooks).
With motivational and educational audiobooks, it has been estimated that drivers can receive the equivalent of a full semester in college with three months' worth of driving.
13. Definitely plan your work
One hour of planning saves three hours of execution.
Carefully planned work will motivate you to do more and worry less.
14. Bounce your thoughts
If our dominant thought habit is pessimistic, all we have to do is dribble with the other hand: Think optimistic thoughts more and more often until it feels natural.
15. Light your lazy dynamite
There wasn't any job that couldn't be handled if they were willing to break it down into little pieces (Henry Ford).
The thought of starting slowly is an easy thought. And doing it slowly allows you to actually start doing it. Therefore it gets finished.
Another thing that happens when you flow into a project slowly is that speed will often overtake you without your forcing it.
16. Choose the happy few
Make a list of friends and acquaintances in whose company you feel more alive, happier, more optimistic.
17. Learn to play a role
Your future is not determined by your personality. You are the thinker who determines who you will be. How you act is who you become.
You'll gather energy and inspiration by being the character you want to play.
I could motivate myself by thinking and acting like a motivated person, just as I could depress myself by thinking and acting like a depressed
person. With practice, the fine line between acting and being disappeared.
18. Don't just do something...sit there
Sitting quietly allows your true dream life to give you hints and flashes of motivation.
The best way to truly understand the world is to remove yourself from it.
"Be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked. It has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet."
19. Use your brain chemicals
When you're having fun, your body chemistry changes and you get new biochemical surges of motivation and energy.
Start by finding out what it does to your mood and energy to laugh, to sing, to dance, to walk, to run, to hug someone, or to get something done.
20. Leave high school forever
Do not live like you are still teenagers, reacting to the imagined judgments of other people. You end up designing your lives based on what other people might be thinking about you. You can motivate yourself by yourself, without depending on the opinions of others.
21. Learn to lose your cool
Look bad. Take a risk. Lose face. Be yourself. Share yourself with someone. Open up. Be vulnerable. Be human. Leave your comfort zone. Get honest. Experience the fear. Do it anyway.
we can build the vulnerability in ourself until we're not afraid to open up into an ever-widening spectrum of self-revelation. By losing face, we connect to the real excitement of life.
22. Kill your television
Communicating inside thoughtful chat rooms and sending and receiving e-mail both grow the brain.
Television does the opposite.
23. Break out of your soul cage
Only challenge causes growth. Only challenge will test our skills and make us better. Only challenge and the self-motivation to engage the challenge will transform us. Every challenge we face is an opportunity to create a more skillful self.
So it is up to you to constantly look for challenges to motivate yourself with.
Use your comfort zones to rest in, not to live in. Use them consciously to relax and restore your energy as you mentally prepare for your next
challenge
24. Run your own plays
Design your own life's game plan. Let the game respond to you rather than the other way around.
You can create your own plans in advance so that your life will respond to you.
Most of us spend whole days *reacting* without being aware of it.
See the tasks ahead as plays you're going to run. You'll feel involved in your life at its very essence.
25. Find your inner Einstein
Every human has the capacity for some form of genius.
"Imagination is more important than knowledge."
If you go back into that state of self-confidence and dream again, you'll be pleasantly surprised at how many innovative and immediate solutions you come up with to your problems.
the first task was to begin imagining the vision of who you wanted to be.
"That's you / in your wildest dreams / doing the wildest things / no one
else can do. If you / just love and keep those dreams / the wildest
dreams / you'll make yourself come true."
26. Run toward your fear
If you pass through even a thin curtain of fear you will increase the confidence you have in your ability to create your life.
Fear of doing it can only be cured by doing it. And soon my confidence was built by doing it again and again.
The rush we get after running through the waterfall of fear is the most energizing feeling in the world.
27. Create the way you relate
We can't create our truest selves without creating relationships in the process.
"We are each of us angels with only one wing," said the Italian artist Luciano de Crescenzo, "and we can only fly embracing each other."
28. Try interactive listening
"When we are listened to, it creates us, makes us unfold and expand. Ideas actually begin to grow within us and come to life."
29. Embrace your willpower
You should know that your willpower, like a muscle in your arm, is yours to develop. You are in charge of making it strong or letting it atrophy.
30. Perform your little rituals
Make up a ritual that is yours and yours alone—a ritual that will be your own shortcut to self-motivation.
Doing something is what leads to doing something. It's a law of the universe: An object in motion stays in motion.
31. Find a place to come from
32. Be your own disciple
When we resist a small temptation, we take on a small power. When we resist a huge temptation, we take on huge power.
William James recommended that we do at least two things every day that we don't want to do—for the very reason that we don't want to do them—just to keep will-power alive. By doing this, we maintain our awareness of our own will.
33. Turn into a word processor
Zen philosopher and scholar Alan Watts also used to hate the word "discipline" because it had so many negative connotations.
So he would substitute the word "skill" for "discipline" and when he did that he was able to develop his own self-discipline.
Language leads to power, so be conscious of the creative potential of the language you use, and guide it in the direction of more personal power.
34. Program your biocomputer
We passively feed ourselves with stories about serial killers and violent crime without any conscious awareness of the choice we're making.
Program out all the negative, cynical, and skeptical thoughts that you now allow to flow into your mind unchecked when you hear the news.
Make your own news. Be your own breaking story. Don't look to the media to tell you what's happening in your life. Be what's happening.
35. Open your present
Make the most of your awareness of this hour.
Don't live in the past (unless you want guilt) or worry about the future (unless you want fear), but stay focused on today (in case you want happiness).
36. Be a good detective
37. Make a relation-shift
Motivate yourself by giving someone else the ideas necessary for self-motivation.
38. Learn to come from behind
Progress toward your goals is never going to be a straight line. It will always be a bumpy line.
It isn't aging that causes a brain to become less sharp, it's simply lack of use.
You can start a highly motivated life right now by increasing the challenges you give your brain.
39. Come to your own rescue
40. Find your soul purpose
First find out what makes you happy, and then start doing it.
Whatever goal you want to reach, you can reach it 10 times faster if you are happy.
41. Get up on the right side
Dreams, energy, and creative insight come from the right side of the brain, while linear, logical, short-term, and shortsighted thinking come from the left.
Self-motivation gets more and more exciting as the left brain gets better and better at telling the right brain what to do.
42. Let your whole brain play
The three best ways to activate whole-brain thinking are through
1) goal-visualization,
2) joyful work,
3) revitalizing play
Rather than
Create internal challenge games of your own—goals and purposes—that lead you in growth toward the motivated person you want to become.
43. Get your stars out (let the stars that are in you shine freely)
44. Just make everything up
Think of creating in simpler terms. Think of it as something all humans do very easily.
"Always think of what you have to do as easy and it will be."
45. Put on your game face
By changing our study into a challenging game, we had taken the "work" out of the task and replaced it with play.
Whatever it is you have to do, whether it's a major project at work, or a huge cleaning job at home, turning it into a game will always bring you higher levels of energy and motivation.
46. Discover active relaxation
Active relaxation (play games, play cards, work in the garden, walk the dog) refreshes and restores the mind. It keeps it flexible and toned for thinking.
47. Make today a masterpiece
Life is now. Life is not later on.
Self-motivation flows from the importance we attach to today.
The key to personal transformation is in your willingness to do very tiny things—but to do them today.
You were "born" when you woke up, and you'll "die" when you go to sleep. It was designed this way, so that you could live your whole life in a day.
48. Enjoy all your problems
Every solution has a problem. You can't have one without the other.
We know that problems are good for our children. By solving problems, our kids will become more self-sufficient. They'll trust their own minds more. They'll see themselves as problem-solvers.
49. Remind your mind
The trick is to keep the motivation going. To deliberately feed your spirit with the optimistic ideas you want to live by. Any time a thought, sentence, or paragraph inspires you or opens up your thinking, you need to capture it, and later release it into your own field of consciousness.
Are you willing to remind yourself to treat yourself to your own best thoughts? Are you willing to set visual traps and ambushes, so you'll always see words and thoughts you know you want to remember?
50. Get down and get small
Career goals, yearly goals, and monthly performance goals are always on the mind of a person with ambition.
But often those people overlook altogether the power of small goals—goals set during the day that give energy to the day and a sense of achieving a lot of small "wins" along the way.
In his psychological masterpiece, Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi refers to large goals as "outcome" goals and small goals as "process" goals. The beauty of "process" goals is that they are always within your immediate power to achieve.
Process goals give you total focus. When you are constantly setting process goals, you are in more control of your day, and you feel a sense of skillful self-motivation.
51. Advertise to yourself
"treasure-mapping" (posting pictures of what you want in life somewhere in your office or home).
Because the subconscious mind only communicates with vividly imagined or real pictures, it will not seek to bring into your life anything you can't picture.
Without advertising our goals to ourselves, we can lose sight of them altogether. It is possible to go an entire week, or two or three, without thinking about our main goals in life. We get caught up in reacting and responding to people and circumstances and we simply forget to think about our own purpose.
And this illustrates something important. We need to advertise our own goals to ourselves. Otherwise, our psychic energy is spread too thin across the spectrum of things that aren't that important to us.
52. Think outside the box
Great motivational energy occurs when we get out of the box and assume that the possibilities for creative ideas are infinite. To realize the best possible future for yourself, don't look at it through a box containing your own past.
53. Keep thinking, keep thinking
Whenever you feel pessimistic or overwhelmed, remember to keep thinking.
An optimist keeps thinking and self-motivates. A pessimist quits thinking—and then just quits.
54. Put on a good debate
55. Make trouble work for you
We begin to see the truth that every problem carries a gift inside it.
By choosing to make use of seemingly bad events, you can access that gift much sooner. By asking yourself "How can I use this?" or "What might be good about this?" you can turn your life around on a dime.
56. Storm your own brain
The main rules of the brainstorming session are
1) there are no stupid ideas—the more unreasonable the better
2) everyone must play.
List-of-20 self-storming technique:
On the top of a piece of paper you put a problem you want solved or a goal you want reached. You then put numbers 1 through 20 on the paper and begin your brain-storming session. You have to list 20 ideas, and they don't have to be well thought out or even reasonable. If you do this for a week, you will end up with 100 ideas!
57. Keep changing your voice
You are not stuck with the voice you have now. Start singing, and soon you'll be creating the voice you'd like to have. The stronger your voice, the stronger your confidence and the stronger your confidence, the easier it is to motivate yourself.
58. Embrace the new frontier
"Learn as if you were to live forever. Live as if you were to die tomorrow."
Today your employability depends on one thing—your current skills. And those skills are completely under your control. This is the new frontier.
The more we learn about the future, the more motivated we become to be a valuable part of it.
59. Upgrade your old habits
Honor the need by replacing the current habit with one that is healthier and more effective. Replace one habit, and soon you'll be motivated to replace
another.
60. Paint your masterpiece today
Wake up and visualize your day as a blank canvas. Ask yourself, "Who's the artist today? Blind circumstance, or me? If I choose to be the artist, how do I want to paint my day?"
61. Swim laps underwater
Your brain stops working after you sit in a swivel chair for 20 minutes. Keep the body moving around so the juices will run to the right places. It'll be good for the brain! If you sit in that chair too long all of your brainpower will be in your shoes. You cannot keep your mind active when your body is
inactive.
Sometimes, all you need is the air that you breathe to motivate yourself. Going for a run or a walk or simply deep breathing gives the brain the fuel it feeds on to be newly refreshed and creative.
62. Bring on a good coach
Ask someone to be honest with you and coach you for a while. Let them check your "swing." Let them tell you what they see. It's a courageous thing to do, and it will always lead to more self-motivation and growth.
63. Try to sell your "home"
Identify the habits that keep you trapped. Identify what you have decided is your final personality and accept that it might be a hasty construction built only to keep you safe from risk and growth.
Don't be afraid to leave the psychic home you're in. Get excited about building a larger, newer, happier home in your mind, and then go live there.
64. Get your soul to talk
We get our creative thinking going each morning by asking ourselves two questions: 1) What's good in my life? and 2) What is there still to be done?
65. Promise the moon
One frightening and effective way to motivate yourself is to make an unreasonable promise—to go to someone you care about, either personally or professionally, and promise them something really big, something that will take all the effort and creativity you've got to make happen.
66. Make somebody's day
"You cannot live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you."
67. Play the circle game
If you hit your daily goal every day, your monthly goal is automatically hit—in fact you don't even have to worry about it. And if your monthly goal is reached, the yearly goal has to happen. And if your yearly goals are hit, the lifelong goal cannot not be reached.
68. Get up a game
Losing teaches kids to grow in the face of defeat. It also teaches them that losing isn't the same as
dying, or being worthless. It's just the other side of winning. If we teach children to fear competition because of the possibility of losing, then we actually lower their self-esteem.
Compete wherever you can. But always compete in the spirit of fun, knowing that finally surpassing someone else is far less important than surpassing yourself.
69. Turn your mother down
If the child has an optimistic mother, this is great, but it can be a disaster for the child if the child has a
pessimistic mother
What works better is self-creation: to produce a voice in your head that's so confident and strong that your mother's voice gets edited out, and your own voice becomes the only one you hear
70. Face the sun
"When you face the sun, the shadows always fall behind you."
What you look at and what you face grows in your life. What you ignore falls behind you. But if you turn and look only at the shadows, they become your life.
"The way we choose to see the world creates the world we see."
71. Travel deep inside
Your journey can be internal. You can travel deeper and deeper inside to find out your own potential. Your potential is your true identity—it only waits for self-motivation to come alive.
Don't look outside yourself to find out who you are, look inside and create who you are.
72. Go to war
We don't have to wait for something tragic or dangerous to attack us from the outside. We can get the same vitality going by challenging ourselves from within.
"If I had just a year to live, how would I live differently? What exactly would I do?"
73. Use the 5% solution
Huge things can be accomplished by focusing on one small action at a time.
When we stay the same, it's not because we didn't make a big enough change, but rather because we didn't do anything today that sent us moving toward change.
A tiny thing you did differently today will excite you. You are moving in the direction of change.
If you want to change yourself, try making the changes as small as they can be. If you want to create yourself, like a great painting, don't be afraid to use tiny brush strokes.
74. Do something badly
"Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts"
"If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly."
If you're not motivated to do something you know you need to do, just decide to do it badly. Add a little self-deprecating humor. Be comically bad at what you're doing. And then enjoy what happens to you once you're into the process.
75. Learn visioneering
You won't do anything you can't picture yourself doing. Visioneering is just another word for picturing yourself. Once you make the picturing process conscious and deliberate, you begin to
create the self you want to be. We dive into the pictures we create.
76. Lighten things up
Pick a frightening problem. Then do the following: Talk about it with someone, draw an illustrated map of it on a huge piece of paper, make "Top 10" lists about the problem, tell yourself some jokes about the
problem, sing about the problem and, finally, dance a dance that expresses the problem.
Your problem will seem a lot funnier, and less frightening, than it once did.
Any time you are stuck, ask yourself to take things lightly. Ask yourself to come up with some funny solutions. Laughter will destroy all limits to your thinking. When you are laughing, you are open to anything.
77. Serve and grow rich
It is almost impossible to enjoy a life of self-motivation when you're worried about money.
78. Make a list of your life
Writing lists of goals and objectives is a powerful self-motivator.
We can be writing our history while it happens.
A goal gains power when you write it down, and more power every time you write it down.
79. Set a specific power goal
A power goal is a goal that takes on a huge reality. It lives and breathes. It provides motivational energy. It gets you up in the morning. You can taste it, smell it, and feel it. You've got it clearly pictured in your mind. You've got it written down. And you love writing it down because every time you do it fills you with clarity of purpose.
A power goal is a dream with a deadline. The deadline itself motivates you. People who have created power goals start living on purpose. They know what they're up to in life.
How can you tell if you've got a big enough and real enough power goal? Simply observe the effect your goal has on you. It's not what a goal is that matters; it's what a goal does.
80. Change yourself first
Don't change other people. It doesn't work. You'll waste your life trying. Be the change you wish to see in others.
Nobody really wants to be taught by lectures and advice. They want to be led through inspiration.
81. Pin your life down
Before any adventure, take time to plan. Design your own plan of attack. Let life respond to you. If you're making all the first moves, you'll be surprised at how often you can pin life down.
82. Take no for a question
When you ask for something in professional life and it is denied to you, imagine that the no you heard is really a question: "Can't you be more creative than that?" Never accept no at face value. Let rejection
motivate you to get more creative.
83. Take the road to somewhere
Energy comes from purpose. Knowing what you're up to, and why you're up to it, gives you the
energy to self-motivate. Not knowing your purpose drains you of all motivation.
Purpose can be built, strengthened, and made more inspiring every day.
We are totally responsible for our own sense of purpose. We can go inside our own spirit and create it, or not. The energy of our lives is wholly dependent on how much purpose we're willing to create.
84. Go on a news fast
85. Replace worry with action
Don't worry. Or rather, don't just worry. Let worry change into action.
Don't be scared about the action; you can make it very small and easy, as long as you take an action. Even small actions will chase away your fears. Fear has a hard time coexisting with action. When there's action, there's no fear.
The next time you're worried about something, ask yourself, "What small thing can I do right now?" Then do it. Remember not to ask, "What could I possibly do to make this whole thing go away?" That
question does not get you into action at all.
Acting on your worries frees you up for other things. It removes fear and uncertainty from your life and puts you back in control of creating what you want. Just do it.
86. Run with the thinkers
The Whiners were often very smart and dedicated employees who worked long, hard hours. But when they came into the manager's office, it was almost always to complain.
The Thinkers, on the other hand, had a different way of coming into the office with problems. "The Thinkers come to me with ideas," he said. "They see the same problems that the Whiners see, but they've already thought about possible solutions."
You are more valuable to your organization with this orientation to thinking, and you're more valuable to yourself.
87. Put more enjoyment in
You can increase your own self-motivation by learning to be more aware of the profound difference between enjoyment and mere pleasure.
- Pleasure (routine sex, eating, drinking, etc.)
- Enjoyment is deeper. Enjoyment always involves the use of a skill and the facing of a challenge.
People who get clear on that difference begin to put more enjoyment into their lives. They reach the happy and fulfilled psychological state known as "flow." Increasing their skills and seeking challenges to engage those skills are what lead to an enjoyable life.
88. Keep walking
I increased my walking just to see what would happen if my lungs became my mattress. I began to get happier. I began to enjoy life more. I began to be more motivated.
89. Read more mysteries
The person with the highest IQ ever measured—Marilyn Vos Savant —recommends mystery novels as brain builders. Vos Savant sees the reading of mysteries as something that leads to a stronger intelligence.
90. Think your way up
People let their emotions speak for them, instead of their thoughts. So what you hear is fear, anger, sadness, or other emotions put to words, but never creating anything.
"Love is always creative and fear is always destructive."
Go ahead and feel your feelings. But when it's time to talk, let your mind into the conversation. Your mind is what motivates you to your highest performance, not your feelings.
91. Exploit your weakness
Make a list of your strengths and your weaknesses on separate pieces of paper. Place the list of strengths somewhere where you'll see it again, because it will always pick you up.
Now look at your list of weaknesses and study them for a while. Stay with them until you feel no shame or guilt about them. Allow them to become interesting characteristics, instead of negative traits. Ask yourself how each characteristic could be useful to you.
There isn't anything on your weakness list that can't be a strength for you if you think about it long enough. The problem is, our weaknesses embarrass us. But embarrassment is not real thinking. Once we really start thinking about our weaknesses they can become strengths, and
creative possibilities emerge.
92. Try becoming the problem
Whatever type of problem you are facing, the most self-motivational exercise I know of is to immediately say to yourself, "I am the problem."
Because once you see yourself as the problem, you can see yourself as the solution.
"In most situations, I am the problem. My mentalities, my pictures, my expectations, form the biggest obstacle to my success."
By seeing ourselves as victims of our problems, we lose the power to solve them. We shut down creativity when we declare the source of the trouble to be outside of us.
However, once we say, "I am the problem," there is great power that shifts from the outside to the inside. Now we can become the solution.
Once I discovered that accepting responsibility for the problem also gave me new power for solving it, I became free.
93. Enlarge your objective
Take a certain goal of yours and double it. Or triple it. Or multiply it by 10. And then ask yourself, quite seriously, what you would have to do to achieve that new goal.
Inflating my goal puts me at a different level of thinking, and because I'm solving the problem of 10, I always get at least two.
If you want to really get some fresh motivational ideas, try expanding your goal. Blow it up until it scares you. Then proceed in your thinking as if it's a must that you achieve it. Remember that this is just a self-contained game, not a promise to anyone else. But it's a game that's fun to play because it works.
94. Give yourself flying lessons
We need heroes in our lives. They are a source of strength. Heroes show us what's possible for a human being to accomplish.Therefore, heroes are very useful to anyone who is in the process of finally understanding self-motivation.
When used properly, a hero can be an enriching source of energy and inspiration. You don't have to have just one hero, either. Choose a number of them. Put their pictures up. Become an expert on their lives.
Collect books about them.
The best use of heroes is not to just be in awe of them, but to learn something from them. To let their lives inspire us. They are only people like we are. What distinguishes them from us is the great levels they've reached in self-motivation. To passively adore them is to insult our own potential. Instead of looking up to our heroes, it is much more beneficial to look into them.
95. Hold your vision accountable
"It's not what a vision is, it's what a vision does."
What does your vision do? Does it give you energy? Does it make you smile? Does it get you up in the morning? When you're tired, does it take you that extra mile? A vision should be judged by these criteria, the criteria of power and effectiveness. What does it do?
Step one in the creative process is having a vision of what you want to create. Without this vision, there is no way to create. Without this vision, you are only problem-eliminating, which is a double negative. It's impossible to feel positive about a life based on a double negative.
So the way to alter your thinking is to notice when you're drifting into, "What do I want to get rid of?" and mentally replace that thinking with, "What do I want to bring into being?"
Are you positive or are you negative? Are you creating or are you reacting? Are you on or are you off?
And there's nothing more motivational to flip your binary switch to "on" than a clear vision of what it is that you really want. What do you want to bring into being? It doesn't matter what that vision is or how often it changes. It only matters what that vision does.
96. Build your power base
Knowledge is power. What you know is your power base—it's the battery you run on.
Unless we consciously decide to build our own knowledge base, with a sense of direction to it, then we will be programmed, totally, by random input.
Take control of what you know. The more you know about what motivates you, the easier it is to motivate yourself. The more you know about the human brain, the less trouble you have operating it.
Knowledge is power. Respect yours and build on it.
97. Connect truth to beauty
I'll even hear about people—usually people who you can't believe about anything—described as "a mess." And conversely, a person who you can always count on to be honest with you is often referred to as a "beautiful" person.
Truth and beauty become impossible to separate. Truth leads you to a more confident level in your relationships with others and with yourself. It diminishes fear and increases your sense of personal mastery. Lies and half-truths will always weigh you down, whereas truth will clear up your thinking and give you the energy and clarity needed for self-motivation.
98. Read yourself a story
Any time you have an opportunity to read something that is important to you, try reading it aloud and see if you don't make twice the impression on yourself. When you discover something you want to remember, and draw upon in the future, read it aloud.
However, if you want a real shot of adrenaline to your spirit, I recommend you mark this page
and when you're alone, read it aloud like Lincoln:
"I will act now. I will act now. I will act now. Henceforth, I will repeat these words again and again, each hour, each day, every day, until the words become a habit as my breathing and the actions which follow become as instinctive as the blinking of my eyelids. With these words I can condition my mind to perform every act necessary for my success. With these words I can condition my mind to meet every challenge."
99. Laugh for no reason
You want to be enthusiastic, you can get there by acting as if you were already enthusiastic. Sometimes it takes a minute. Sometimes it skips a beat. But it always works if you stay with it, no matter how ridiculous you feel doing it.
Feel ridiculous. If you want to be happy, find the happiest song you know and sing it. It works. Not always in the first few moments, but if you keep at it, it works. Just fake it until you make it. Soon your happy singing will show you how much control you do have over your own.
Laughter itself can make you laugh.
But adults, like me, might want to get back that appreciation for joyful spontaneity. We might want to confront the question, "What is the one thing that most makes me feel like singing?" And then know the answer: "Singing." What most gets you in the mood to dance? Dancing. The next time you ask someone to dance, and they say, "I don't feel like dancing," you might reply, "That's because you're not dancing."
100. Walk with love and death
When I need to get through something, face something, or create a courageous action plan—I take long walks. When I walk long and far enough, a solution always appears. I eventually get oriented to the most creative course of action.
101. Teach yourself the power of negative thinking
Write down what you don't want in your life. List every major problem and source of discomfort you have. All your worries. All the negative things you can think of, even if they haven't come into reality yet. Even if they are just things you don't want to happen in the future. Take your time and be
thorough.
So if you're stuck without any truly motivating goals, dreams or commitments, then go negative first. Figure out what you absolutely don't want—what you absolutely fear and dread and refuse to let in to
your life—then convert it to its opposite, positive form and see what happens. You'll be more motivated than you ever dreamed you could be.
This explains why so many successful people had difficult upbringings, sometimes living in the harshest poverty. They connected very early to what they didn't want. The rest was clear sailing.
The next time you lack passion when thinking of what you want, try turning it around. Ask yourself what you absolutely don't want, and then feel the energy building in you to overcome that problem.
That energy you're feeling is the deepest and most primal form of motivation.
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