Page 133 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

that little free workshop with putting me into full-time public speaking.

Was it an original idea? No, I stole it. I copied a hero of mine. But our
awareness of the choice involving heroes is vital for self-creation. We can envy
them or we can emulate them. The best use of heroes is not to just be in awe of
them, but to learn something from them. To let their lives inspire us. They are
only people like we are. What distinguishes them from us is the great levels
they’ve reached in self-motivation. To passively adore them is to insult our own
potential. Instead of looking up to our heroes, it is much more beneficial to look
into them.

95. Hold your vision accountable

“It’s not what a vision is,” says Robert Fritz “it’s what a vision does.”

What does your vision do? Does it give you energy? Does it make you
smile? Does it get you up in the morning? When you’re tired, does it take you
that extra mile? A vision should be judged by these criteria, the criteria of power

and effectiveness. What does it do?

Robert Fritz is widely quoted in Peter Senge’s business masterpiece, The
Fifth Discipline. Fritz is a former musician who has taken the basic principles of
creativity in music composition and applied them to creating a successful
professional life. Life gets good, he argues, when we get clear on what we want
to create.

Most people spend most of their waking hours trying to make problems go
away. This lifelong crusade to solve one’s problems is a negative and reactive
existence. It sells us short and leaves us at the end of life (or at the end of the
day) with, at best, the double-negative feeling of “fewer problems”!

Fritz points out in The Path of Least Resistance:

There is a profound difference between problem solving and creating.
Problem solving is taking action to have something go away—the
problem. Creating is taking action to have something come into being
—the creation. Most of us have been raised in a tradition of problem-
solving and have little real exposure to the creative process.

Step one in the creative process is having a vision of what you want to