Page 124 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

watched in the past week. In watching television, there is no combination of skill

and challenge.

Contrast that dull pleasure hangover we get from watching television with
what happens when we spend the same amount of time preparing for a big
Thanksgiving dinner for friends and relatives. In looking back, we remember
quite vividly the entire Thanksgiving endeavor.

Despite her run-ins with Wall Street and the law, one of the most intriguing
people on our national scene has always been Martha Stewart. Throughout the
1990s, she personified mastery of the concept of small enjoyments. Her
magazines and television programs celebrated cooking, gardening, and home
entertainment skills. Her own contagious enthusiasm for the things she enjoyed
made her, in my opinion, one of that decade’s true heroes of optimism. If you’re
feeling as though you have forgotten how to enjoy your own home, yard, or

kitchen, you might buy one of her books and allow her optimism to inspire you.
You can increase your own self-motivation by learning to be more aware of the
profound difference between enjoyment and mere pleasure.

88. Keep walking

Ever since I was a child, I had a recurring dream that I began each day
facing a mattress. The more I pushed into this mattress before my day began, the
more the indentation went in, and the more saved-up the sprung energy of the
mattress got. The more the mattress was indented with my pushing at the start of
the day, the higher it would spring up when I lay down on it to sleep at night. I
would lie down on this mattress at night and see how high my dreams would
send me. How high I flew would always depend on the indentations I gave the
mattress during the day. The impressions I gave it. How impressive I was. The
difference I made.

After thinking about that dream, I decided to step up my walking. I decided
that the recurring dream was the way my subconscious chose to tell me
something vital. Something about the difference walking made. Something about
oxygen being pushed into my system. Walking would be an action I could take
while wide awake. Walking would drive more oxygen into my lungs. I would
become more like the great football coach Amos Alonzo Stagg, who lived to be
103 years old. Amos Alonzo Stagg was asked how he lived to be so old (the
average life expectancy during his lifetime was 65) and he said, “I have, for the