Page 94 - 100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

place like home.”

“Home” can be an ugly place if it’s not kept up and consciously made
beautiful. “Home” can be a dark, damp prison, smelling of bad habits and
laziness. But we still don’t want to leave it, no matter how bad it gets, because
we think we are safe there. However, when we inspect the worn-out house more
closely, we can see that the safety we think we’re experiencing is pure self-
limitation.

After grasping Hardison’s metaphor of home, I immediately saw that I
needed to move out of my house. I needed to move up in the neighborhood. I
needed a better home one that contained habits that would keep me focused on
goal-oriented activity. Hardison helped coach me in that direction until the new
activities began to feel like where I should have been living all along.

Hardison’s metaphor of “home” as the equivalent of old disempowering
habits has stayed with me for a long time. Recently while I was putting together
a tape of motivational music to play in my car, I included the energetic “I’m
Going Home” by Alvin Lee and Ten Years After. As I drove around listening to
it turned up all the way, I thought about what Hardison taught. I let the song be
about the new home I would always be in the process of moving to. Don’t be
afraid to leave the psychic home you’re in. Get excited about building a larger,
newer, happier home in your mind, and then go live there.

In Colin Wilson’s brilliant but little-known, out-of-print novel Necessary
Doubt, he created Gustav Neumann, a fascinating character who made many
discoveries about human beings. At one point Neumann says, “I came to realize
that people build themselves personalities as they build houses—to protect
themselves from the world. They become its prisoners. And most people are in
such a hurry to hide inside their four walls that they build the house too quickly.”

Identify the habits that keep you trapped. Identify what you have decided is
your final personality and accept that it might be a hasty construction built only
to keep you safe from risk and growth. Once you’ve done that, you can leave.
You can get the blueprints out and create the home you really want.

64. Get your soul to talk

We’ve always been a little nervous, culturally, about talking to ourselves.
We usually associate it with insanity. But it was Plato who said that his