Page 35 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

discovered something that was very interesting and bitterly amusing to him after

finally recovering from his addictions. “There isn’t any feeling you can get on
drugs,” he said “that you can’t get without drugs.”

Make a commitment to yourself to find the natural highs you need to stay
motivated. Start by finding out what it does to your mood and energy to laugh, to
sing, to dance, to walk, to run, to hug someone, or to get something done. Then
support your experiments by telling yourself that you’re not interested in doing
anything that isn’t fun. If you can’t immediately see the fun in something, find a
way to create it. Once you have made a task fun, you have solved the problem of
self-motivation.

20. Leave high school forever

Many of us feel as though we’ve been left stranded in high school forever, as
if something happened there that we’ve never shaken off. Before high school, in
our earlier and more carefree childhoods, we were creative dreamers filled with a
boundless sense of energy and wonder. But in high school something got turned
around. For the first time in our lives, we began fearing what other people were
thinking of us. All of a sudden, our mission in life became not to be
embarrassed. We were afraid to look bad, and so we made it a point not to take
risks.

I’ll never forget something that happened to my friend Richard in high
school. Richard and I were walking home from school one day, and all of a
sudden he stopped in his tracks, his face frozen with horror. I looked at him and
asked what was wrong. I thought he was about to suffer some kind of seizure.
He then pointed down at his pants and wordlessly showed me where his belt had
missed a loop!

“I spent the whole day like this!” he finally said. It was impossible for him to

measure what everybody thought of him as they passed him in the halls, perhaps
seeing the belt had missed a loop. The damage to his reputation was probably
beyond repair.

When I give my seminars on motivation, I love the periods when I take
questions from the audience. But many times I can see the painfully adolescent
looks of self-consciousness on people’s faces when they ponder the risk of
asking a question in front of the group. This habit of worrying more about what