Page 50 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

34. Program your biocomputer

If you’re a regular consumer of the major news programs, you belong to a
very persuasive and hypnotic cult. You need to be deprogrammed. Start by
altering how you listen to electronic radio gossip, the news, and shock and
schlock TV shows. Program out all the negative, cynical, and skeptical thoughts
that you now allow to flow into your mind unchecked when you hear the news.
The news is not the news. It is the bad news. It is deliberate shock. The more you
accept it as the news, the more you believe that “that’s the way it is,” and the
more fearful and cynical you will become.

How do we change it? By worrying about it? No. Rather than fretting about
crime and apathy and whatever you wish would change in the world, it’s often
very motivational to heed the words of Gandhi, who said, “You must be the
change you wish to see.”

San Francisco writer and musician Gary Lachman wrote a captivating essay
called “World Rejection and Criminal Romantics” in which he observed, “It’s
the Ted Bundys that get television coverage, not the thousands of self-actualizers

who work away at self-transformation quietly and anonymously. And it’s their
influence, not that of the Ted Bundys, that will shape the face of the coming
century.”

Often we don’t have an opportunity to skip the media reports of crime and
scandal, so it’s important that we listen in a way that always programs out the
effect. We are pretty good at doing this when we pass the tabloids in the grocery
store checkout line. We smile at them even before reading that aliens are living
in the White House. We need to take that same attitude toward what passes as
serious media.

Once you’ve gotten good at factoring out the negative aspects of the media
today, take it a step further: 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

Practice being awake in the present moment. Make the most of your
awareness of this hour. Don’t live in the past (unless you want guilt) or worry