Page 70 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

Colin Wilson writes in New Pathways in Psychology:

This is why people who have a peak experience can go on repeating
them: because it is simply a matter of reminding yourself of something
you have already seen and which you know to be real. In this sense, it
is like any other “recognition” that suddenly dawns on you—for
example, the recognition of the greatness of some composer or artist
whom you had formerly found difficult or incomprehensible, or the
recognition of how to solve a certain problem. Once such a recognition
“dawns” it is easy to reestablish contact with it, because it is there like
some possession, waiting for you to return to it.

During my talks on self-motivation, one of the questions I’m asked most
often is, “How do I keep this going?” People say, “I love what I’ve learned
today, but I’ve often gone to seminars that got me motivated and then a few days

later I was back to my old pessimistic self, doing exactly what I used to do.”

If I were in the mood to be blunt, I would answer the question this way:
Why, if you love what you’ve learned about self-motivation, would you ask me
how to keep it going in your life? The person in this room best equipped to
answer your question is you. So I’ll ask you, how will you keep this going in
your life? I bet you could give me 10 ways you could do it. And I bet that if this
were a foreign language you had to learn, you would set aside a certain amount
of time each day to review it, to read it out loud, and to make certain you learned
it. I bet you’d buy audiobooks for your car and even arrange small study groups.
So the real question is this: is mastering the art of motivation as important as
learning another language?

Once while I was attending a Werner Erhard seminar, I had some free time
during a break so I wrote myself a letter. I put down all the ideas I wanted to
remember from the seminar and I sealed them in an envelope. I took it home and
a month later I mailed it to myself. When I opened it at work and read it, it was
like a fresh experience all over again. I was so impressed by how effective this
was for me that I employed the idea in one of my own seminars. I had everyone
in the audience write out the important insights they’d received and what they
intended to do differently in their lives from this moment on. When they were
finished, I asked them to seal the letters into the envelopes I’d provided and
address the envelopes to themselves. I told them I would hold them for a month
and then mail them all.

The reports I got back were remarkable. Some people said seeing those