Page 61 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

41. Get up on the right side

Since I was a child, I’ve always been intrigued with the idea that you could
have a great day just by getting up on the right side of the bed. Later in life,
during my years as a largely unsuccessful songwriter, one of the few successes I
had was with a country rock song that I co-wrote with Fred Knipe and Duncan
Stitt. It was called “The Right Side of the Wrong Bed.” Today my fascination is
not so much with the right side of the bed as it is with the right side of the head
—or to be more precise, the right side of the brain.

The best explanation of how “whole-brain” thinking surpasses left-brain
thinking or right-brain thinking is in a book written by British philosopher Colin
Wilson called Frankenstein’s Castle. Wilson reveals that we have more control
over drawing vital energy and creative ideas from the right brain than we ever
realized. And what stimulates the right brain the most is a high sense of purpose.

If you had to carry a heavy sack of sand across town, your left brain might
get upset and tell you that you were doing something boring and tedious.
However, if your child were injured badly and she weighed the same as the huge

bag of sand, you’d carry her the same distance to the hospital with a surprising
surge of vital energy (sent from the right brain). That’s what purpose does to the
brain. Self-motivation gets more and more exciting as the left brain gets better
and better at telling the right brain what to do.

42. Let your whole brain play

Passive misuse of the brain leads to a life of reaction rather than creation.

When Oliver Wendell Holmes said that “most people go to their graves with
their music still in them,” he just as easily could have said that most people live
in their left brain only. When Thoreau said, “most men lead lives of quiet
desperation,” he was describing what life is like if you stay trapped in left-brain,
linear, short-sighted thinking.

But the irony is that the left brain has gotten an unfairly negative reputation,
simply because people stay trapped there. When people learn that the left brain is
there to connect with the right, then it takes on new power and function. When
people stay trapped in linear, flat, and logical left-brain thinking and never
activate the creative right side of the brain, they lose their love of life. The right