Page 40 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

day. We become goalies in the hockey game of life, with pucks flying at us

incessantly. It’s time to play another position. It’s time to fly across the ice with
the puck on our own stick ready to shoot at another goal.

You can create your own plans in advance so that your life will respond to
you. If you can hold the thought that at all times your life is either a creation or a
reaction, you can continually remind yourself to be creating and planning.
Creation and reaction have the same letters in them, exactly; they are anagrams.

Robert Fritz, who has written some of the most profound and useful books
on the differences between creating and reacting, says, “When your life itself
becomes the subject matter of the creative process, a very different experience of
life opens to you—one in which you are involved with life at its very essence.”

Plan your day the way Bill Walsh planned his football games. See the tasks
ahead as plays you’re going to run. You’ll feel involved in your life at its very
essence, because you’ll be encouraging the world to respond to you. If you don’t
choose to do that, the life you get won’t be an accident. As an old Jewish folk
saying puts it, “A person who does not make a choice makes a choice.”

25. Find your inner Einstein

The next time you see a picture of Albert Einstein, realize that that’s actually
you. See Albert Einstein and say, “There I am.” Every human has the capacity
for some form of genius. You don’t have to be good at math or physics to
experience genius level in your thinking. To experience Einstein’s creative level
of thinking, all you have to do is habitually use your imagination.

This is a difficult recommendation for adults to follow, though, because
adults have become accustomed to using their imaginations for only one thing:
worrying. Adults visualize worst-case scenarios all day long. All their energy for
visualization is channeled into colorful pictures of what they dread.

What they don’t comprehend is that worry is a misuse of the imagination.
The human imagination was designed for better things. People who use their
imaginations to create with often achieve things that worriers never dream of
achieving, even if the worriers possess much higher IQs. People who habitually
access their imaginations are often hailed by their colleagues as “geniuses”—as
if “genius” were a genetic characteristic. They would be better understood as
people who are practiced at accessing their genius.