Page 153 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

What I like to do, once I or one of my clients has an outcome goal, a results

goal, is to only let that goal help inform my plan for what I’m going to do today.
For example, an Olympic athlete such as Michael Phelps might dream of six
gold medals in the Olympics, but he and his coach have to reduce that, translate
it into the kind of day they are going to have at the pool today. What kind of day,
if repeated, would lead to that goal?

If I want to look a certain way, how would I work out and what would my
diet be today for me to look that way? What we’re looking for to get you the best
human performance, even in such categories as marital happiness, is “What can I
do today?” Not “How do I achieve my big, dreamy goal way down the road?”
There is no road, and there is no guaranteed future. The game changes. Life
changes. Therefore the real goal is to honor the microcosm.

A day is a microcosm of life itself. You can “die” at night when you go to

sleep and experience rebirth when you wake up. Most people see that as a
positive thing. They say things such as, “Wow, what a great sleep I had… I had
a dreamless sleep… I was dead to the world. I feel great.” You are then born
again each morning.

If I can really live this way, and teach my children and clients to do the
same, and practice living this way, then things always turn out well because I
have leverage and access to my energy now. I’m going to do my 100 pushups,
I’m going to do my walking, my running, I’m going to do my writing for my
book, I’m going to make 10 sales calls. These are all things I can do and they
don’t depend on the universe returning something to me.

Today is where it all happens.

109. Create a different system!

The great genius Buckminster Fuller said, “You can’t change anything by

fighting or resisting it. You change something by making it obsolete through
superior methods.” Making the bad thing go away is a double negative: bad
thing and go away are both negative. To change my life, I want positive energy.
What Buckminster Fuller is saying is an important part of why coaching and
consulting works. My coach does not have me fight off bad habits. My coach has
me execute superior methods of living that make the bad things a mere memory.

What I learned from the visionary and enlightened president of Microchip