Page 135 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

96. Build your power base

Knowledge is power. What you know is your power base—it’s the battery
you run on. You need to charge it constantly and consciously. Who do you want
to be in charge of what you know? News directors? Radio disc jockeys? The
office gossip? Tabloid newspaper editors? A pessimistic family member? Unless
we consciously decide to build our own knowledge base, with a sense of
direction to it, then we will be programmed, totally, by random input. Feeling
miserable and alienated from life is caused by not being in control of what we
know.

“Misery and alienation are not laid upon us by fate,” wrote Colin Wilson.
“They are due to the failure of the ego to accept its role as the controller of
consciousness. All our experiences of happiness and intensity force the same
conviction upon us, for they involve a sense of mastery.” You can be the master
of your own fate. You can make choices all day long about what you are going
to learn and what you are not going to learn.

“What are you reading over there?” someone may ask you. “Oh, it’s just

something I found in the trash,” you might say. And it might seem harmless
enough to read something you found in the wastebasket because there was
nothing else nearby, but whole lives are shaped that way. The computer term
“GIGO”—garbage in, garbage out—is even truer for the human biocomputer
than it is for mechanical computers.

Take control of what you know. The more you know about what motivates
you, the easier it is to motivate yourself. The more you know about the human
brain, the less trouble you have operating it. Knowledge is power. Respect yours
and build on it.

97. Connect truth to beauty

I hate reading motivational material that thunders at me about the
importance of integrity and honesty for their own sake. Somehow, that always
seems to turn me off, because the writers come off like angry preachers and
teachers—hardly inspiring.

I’m always more inspired by things that are made to look interesting and fun.
I’m always taken in by a promise of life being more beautiful and rarely taken in