Page 54 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

Progress toward your goals is never going to be a straight line. It will always

be a bumpy line. You’ll go up and then come down a little. Two steps forward
and one step back. There’s a good rhythm in that. It is like a dance. There’s no
rhythm in a straight line upward.

However, people get discouraged when they slide a step back after two steps
forward. They think they are failing, and that they’ve lost it. But they have not.
They’re simply in step with the natural rhythm of progress. Once you understand
this rhythm, you can work with it instead of against it. You can plan the step
back.

In The Power of Optimism, Alan Loy McGinnis identifies the characteristics
of tough-minded optimists, and one of the most important is that optimists
always plan for renewal. They know in advance that they are going to run out of
energy. “In physics,” says McGinnis, “the law of entropy says that all systems,

left unattended, will run down. Unless new energy is pumped in, the organism
will disintegrate.”

Pessimists don’t want to plan for renewal, because they don’t think there
should have to be any. Pessimists are all-or-nothing thinkers. They’re always
offended when the world is not perfect. They think taking a step backward
means something negative about the whole project. “If this were a good
marriage, we wouldn’t have to rekindle the romance,” a pessimist would say,
dismissing the idea of taking a second honeymoon. But an optimist knows that
there will be ups and downs. And an optimist isn’t scared or discouraged by the
downs. In fact, an optimist plans for the downs, and prepares creative ways to
deal with them.

You can schedule your own comebacks. You can look ahead on your
calendar and block out time to refresh and renew and recover. Even if you feel
very “up” right now, it’s smart to plan for renewal. Schedule your own
comeback while you’re on top. Build in big periods of time to get away—even
to get away from what you love.

If you catch yourself thinking that you are too old to do something you want
to do, recognize that you are now listening to the pessimistic voice inside of you.
It is not the voice of truth. You can talk back. You can remind the voice of all

the people in life who have started their lives over again at any age they wanted
to. John Housman, the Emmy award-winning actor in The Paper Chase, started
acting professionally when he was in his 70s.