Motivation

This is for you if:
a) you’re doing the NaNoWriMo (Kent & Nick: you know who you are)
b) you’re one of those much-less-interesting people who isn’t. ;-)

I hope you and the copyright holder will forgive the extended quotation.

[From: Barbara Sher, Live the Life You Love: In Ten Easy Step-by-Step Lessons (Rydalmere NSW: Hodder Headline Australia, 1996) ISBN: 0733603866.]

[about motivation]

p3. Just think positive, tough it out, never quit. If you can’t follow through on a dream, the problem is all in your head. Change your thinking.

Pardon me, but when I write those words I start getting all steamed up because believing them made me feel like a complete failure. If those phrases work for you, more power to you, but they have never worked for me. I can’t tell myself how to think. I can’t do just anything I set my mind to (trust me on that one - I’ve been trying to learn Latin for years). As for quitting, I’m famous for it.

p4. If I was such a failure, how had I managed to finish school and hold jobs and raise kids? Those were all hard to do. They required continued persistance over many years! And I had done them! How?

p5. Get ready for a shocker: the fact that most of us can’t change [through self-improvement programs] means there’s nothing but hope. If you or I were the only people who had trouble with those rules for success, the problem would be ours. But if most people have trouble following them, maybe the rules are the problem. Assuming that the same program will work for all of us is like feeding oats to a tiger or birdseed to a horse.

p6. Your style of achieving goals might be radically different from mine. That’s fantastically good news. That means the reason most of us haven’t been able to run after our dreams is that we were wearing the wrong size shoes. All we have to do is discover what fits us, and chances are we’ll do just fine.

p12. […] when it comes to motivation, we’re all different. You may respond to one kind and the person next to you responds to something completely different.

p16. Look back into your past and ask yourself the same question I did: What motivated you? You too have accomplished a lot in your life. Even as a baby you were amazing. You learned how to walk and speak your first language. You went to school, got involved in a sport or a hobby, held a job, or raised a family. Look at what you’ve accomplished and you will find, as I did, that you have your own energy source. You too have instinctively developed ways that motivate you to swing into action and get things done.

p18. What do you need to coax out your best work? Find that and you’ll know the secret to your success.

p28. If you need praise, instruct your friends to praise you. If you need to be scolded, set up a buddy system and you can help each other. Your buddy can scold you (if that works for you) and you can remind your buddy that her enemies will love it if she fails (if that works for her). If you need deadlines, set them for yourself and write them in your calendar; or promise someone you’ll deliver on a certain date. If you work best in a team, pull some people into your project to work with you, and if you need competition, set it up for yourself. Never again judge what you need or assume that you should be able to win using someone else’s motivational style. That’s over. You’re the expert on what you need, so listen to yourself.”

[on gifts]

p6. You arrived on this planet loaded with gifts and talent, seeing the world in a way no one ever saw it before. Nature meant for you to use that unique vision as surely as she meant for a fish to swim or a bird to fly. These gifts are as much yours as the color of your eyes. You didn’t choose them and you didn’t create them. Just as their name implies, they are “gifts.”

And they come with a mandate: “Use us!”