Page 58 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

become a pleasure-seeker, a selfish hedonist from the “me generation.” Instead,

he meant that in order to find out what your true life could be, you should look
for clues in whatever makes you happy.

What gets you excited? In the answer to that question, you’ll discover where
you can be of most service. You can’t live your true life if you’re not serving
people, and you can’t serve people very well if you are not excited about what
you’re doing.

What makes you happy? (I know I already asked, but the fear that “cloaks
the world in silent suffering” comes from not asking that question enough
times.) In my own professional life I have finally found that teaching makes me
happy, writing makes me happy, and performing makes me happy. It took me
many years of unhappiness to finally reach the point of despair necessary to ask
the question: What makes me happy?

I was the creative director for an ad agency and I was making a good deal of
money producing commercials, meeting with clients, and designing marketing
strategies. I could have done this type of work forever, but my horrible fear of
death was my clue that I was not living my true life.

“People living deeply,” wrote Anaïs Nin, “have no fear of death.” I was not
living deeply. And it took me a long time to get clear answers to my question:
What makes me happy? But any question we ask ourselves often enough will

eventually yield the right answer. The problem is, we quit asking.

Fortunately for me, in this rare instance of persistence in the face of extreme
discomfort, I didn’t quit asking. The answer came to me in the form of a
memory—so colorful it was almost like a movie scene. I was driving at night in
my car 10 years earlier, and I was as happy as I had ever been. In fact, I was
driving around aimlessly so that I could keep my feeling of happiness preserved
and contained within that car—I didn’t want anything to interrupt it. It was so
profound that it lasted for hours.

The occasion was a speech I had just given. The subject of it was my
recovery from an addiction, and the night that I spoke I was running such a high
fever, and I had such a fear of speaking in public that I tried to call the talk off.

My hosts wouldn’t hear of it. Somehow I made it to the podium and, probably
because my fever and flu were so intense, I spoke freely, without caution or self-
consciousness. The more I spoke about freedom from addiction, the more
excited I got. My creativity just soared. I remember the audience laughing as I