Page 107 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

help for it. Many writers’ means of earning a living depends on its cure. The

“block” (or lack of self-motivation) occurs not because the writer can’t write, but
because the writer thinks he can’t write well. In other words, the writer thinks he
doesn’t have the proper energy or inspiration to write something, right now,
that’s good enough to submit. So the pessimistic voice inside the writer says,
“You can’t think of anything to write, can you?” This happens to many of us,
even with something as small as a postcard to send, or an overdue e-mail to
answer. But the writer doesn’t really need psychotherapy for this. All he or she
needs is an understanding of how the human mind is working at the moment of
the “block.” The cure for writer’s block—and also the road to self-motivation—
is simple. The cure is to go ahead and write badly.

Novelist Anne Lamott has a chapter in her marvelous book Bird by Bird
called “Shitty First Drafts.” The key to writing, she says, is to just start typing

anything— it can be the worst thing you’ve ever written, it doesn’t matter.
“Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts,” says Lamott. “You
need to start somewhere. Start by getting something—anything—down on
paper.” By the mere act of typing you have disempowered the pessimistic voice
that tried to convince you not to write. Now you are writing. And once you’re in
action, it’s easy to pick up the energy and pick up the quality.

We’re often afraid to do things until we’re sure we’ll do them well.
Therefore we don’t do anything. This tendency led G.K. Chesterton to say, “If a
thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.”

Going out for a run gives me an example of the same phenomenon. Because
I don’t feel that I have a good, strong run in me, the voice says “not today.” But

the cure for that is to decide to do it anyway—even if it will be a bad run. “I
don’t feel like running now, so I’m going to go out and run slowly, in such lazy,
bad form that it does me no good, but at least I will have run.” But once I start,
something always happens to alter my feelings about the run. By the end of the
run, I notice that it had somehow become thoroughly enjoyable.

In my self-motivation seminars, I often give a homework assignment for
people to write down what their main goals are for the next year. I ask them to
fill no more than half a page. This is not a difficult assignment for people who
are willing to just come off the top of their heads and have fun filling the page.
But you would be surprised at how many people absolutely anguish over it,
trying to get it “right,” as if they were going to be held forever to what they
wrote down. Many people simply can’t do it. To get them to complete the