Page 130 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

Before I had realized the full power of a self-motivated life, I spent a lot of

years pointing fingers. If I didn’t have enough money, it was somebody else’s
fault. Even my perceived personality flaws were somebody else’s fault. “I was
never taught that!” I would shout in exasperation. “No one showed me early in
life how to be self-sufficient!” was a complaint I voiced often. But I was
avoiding a basic truth: I was the problem. The reason I fought so hard to avoid
that truth was that I never realized it contained good news. I thought it looked
entirely shameful and negative. But once I discovered that accepting
responsibility for the problem also gave me new power for solving it, I became
free.

93. Enlarge your objective

Here is another self-motivator that also must be used as an intellectual tool
only. Take a certain goal of yours and double it. Or triple it. Or multiply it by 10.
And then ask yourself, quite seriously, what you would have to do to achieve
that new goal.

I used this game recently with a friend who holds a position in sales. He
came to see me because he was selling 100,000 worth of product each month,
the most on his team, and wanted to somehow get to 140,000.

I asked him to tell me what it would take for him to sell 200,000 worth of
equipment each month. “ 200,000!” he shouted. “That’s impossible. I’m leading
the team already with 100,000, and nobody thought that could be done.”

“What would you have to do?” I persisted.

“No,” he said. “You don’t understand. I want to hit 140,000 a month, and
even that is so hard I don’t know how I’ll do it.”

I finally told him the theory behind this game. “If you seriously look at an
outrageous goal, such as 200,000, it will open things up for you creatively that
wouldn’t have opened up if you stayed looking at 140,000.” He nodded slowly
and reluctantly agreed to play along for a while.

“Okay,” he said. “But remember, we’re talking about something that’s
impossible.”

“Fine,” I said. “But if your life depended on hitting 200,000 next month,