Page 87 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

make yourself useful.

The great basketball coach John Wooden recommended that we live by this
credo—especially apt for the new technological frontier: “Learn as if you were
to live forever. Live as if you were to die tomorrow.”

Gone are the days when your employability depended primarily on your job
history, your school ties, your connections, your family, or your seniority. Today
your employability depends on one thing—your current skills. And those skills
are completely under your control. This is the new frontier. And where we once
entered retirement age nervous about the “wolves at our door,” today, with a
commitment to lifelong growth through learning, we can be as useful to the
world community as we are motivated to be. The more we learn about the future,
the more motivated we become to be a valuable part of it.

59. Upgrade your old habits

Bad habits simply cannot be broken. Nor can they be gotten rid of. Ask the

millions who continue to try. They always end up, in the words of author
Richard Brautigan, “trying to shovel mercury with a pitchfork,” because our bad
habits exist for good reasons. They’re there to do something for us, even if that
something ends up being self-destructive. Down deep, even a bad habit is trying
to make us operate better.

People who smoke are trying, even through their addiction, to do something
beneficial—perhaps to breathe deeply and relax. Such breathing is needed to
balance stress, so their smoking is a way in which they are trying to make
themselves better. Bad habits are like that—they are based on a perceived
benefit. That’s why they’re impossible to just “get rid of.”

That’s why habits must be respected and understood before they can be
transformed. What created the habit must be built upon, not killed. We must go

to the beneficial impulse that drives the habit, and then expand on that to make
the habit grow from something bad into something good.

Let’s take drinking as an example. I’ve known people who used to be drunk
all the time who are now sober all the time. How did they do it? Couldn’t we just
say that they just got rid of their drinking habit? Not really. Because, without
exception, the recovered people I know replaced their drinking with something
else.