Page 100 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

but you might go even further with this credo: “Don’t just get even—get better.”

When Michael Jordan was a sophomore in high school, he was cut from his
high school basketball team. Michael Jordan was told by his coach that he
wasn’t good enough to play high school basketball. It was a crushing
disappointment for a young boy whose heart was set on making the team, but he
used the incident—not to get mad, not to get even, but to get better.

We all have those moments when people tell us, or insinuate to us, that they
don’t think we measure up—that they don’t believe in us. Some of us have entire
childhoods filled with that experience. The most common reaction is anger and
resentment. Sometimes it motivates us to “get even” or to prove somebody
wrong. But there’s a better way to respond, a way that is creative rather than
reactive.

“How can I use this?” is the question that puts us on the road to creativity. It
transforms the anger into optimistic energy, so we can grow beyond someone
else’s negative expectations.

Johnny Bench, a Hall of Fame baseball player, knew what it was like to not
be believed in.

“In the second grade,” he said, “they asked us what we wanted to be. I said I
wanted to be a ballplayer and they laughed. In the eighth grade they asked the
same question, and I said a ballplayer, and they laughed a little more. By the

11th grade, no one was laughing.”

Our country has gone through a difficult period of time since World War II.
We no longer value heroes and individual achievement as we once did.
“Competition” has become a bad word. But competition, if confronted
enthusiastically, can be the greatest self-motivating experience in the world.
What some people fear in the idea of competition, I suppose, is that we will
become obsessed with succeeding at somebody else’s expense. That we’ll take
too much pleasure in defeating and therefore “being better” than somebody else.
Many times during conversations with my children’s teachers, I was told how
the school had progressively removed grades and awards from some activities
“so that the kids don’t feel they have to compare themselves to each other.”

They were proud of how they’d softened their educational programs so that there
was less stress and competition. But they were not softening the program—they
were softening the children.

If you are interested in self-motivation, self-creation, and being the best you