100 Ways to Motivate Yourself

by Steve Chandler

“Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.”

“He who is not busy being born is busy dying.”

“What you do is create a vision of who you want to be, and then live into that picture as if it were already true.”

The vision can be created right now—better now than later. You can always change it if you want, but don’t live a moment longer without one. Watch what being hungry to live that vision does to your ability to motivate yourself.

Without a picture of your highest self, you can’t live into that self. Fake it ’till you make it. The lie will become the truth.

The team that is more focused today is the team that will win this game.

Johnson told his team not to be distracted by the crowd, the media, or the possibility of losing, but to focus on each play of the game itself just as if it were a good practice session. The Cowboys won the game 52-17.

the more you sweat in peacetime, the less you bleed in war.

Whenever I’m afraid of something coming up, I will find a way to do something that’s even harder or scarier. Once I do the harder thing, the real thing becomes fun.

The simpler you keep it, the stronger it gets.

It’s hard to stay motivated when you’re confused. When you simplify your life, it gathers focus. The more you can focus your life, the more motivated it gets.

When I am happy, I see the happiness in others. When I am compassionate, I see the compassion in other people. When I am full of energy and hope, I see opportunities all around me. But when I am angry, I see other people as unnecessarily testy. When I am depressed, I notice that people’s eyes look sad. When I am weary, I see the world as boring and unattractive. Who I am is what I see!

Our self-motivation suffers most from how we choose to see the circumstances in our lives. That’s because we don’t see things as they are, we see things as we are.

It is always our choice. Which world do we want to see today? Opportunity is life’s gold. It’s all you need to be happy. It’s the fertile field in which you grow as a person. And opportunities are like those subatomic quantum particles that come into existence only when they are seen by an observer. Your opportunities will multiply when you choose to see them.

From now on, make it a personal commitment to notice everything that pushes your buttons. Make a note of everything that inspires you. That’s your control panel. Those buttons operate your whole system of personal motivation.

It’s not what we do that makes us tired—it’s what we don’t do. The tasks we don’t complete cause the most fatigue.

Stop worrying about what you think of yourself and start building a track record that proves that you can motivate yourself to do whatever you want to do.

So, what is this master key to riches? “The great master key to riches,” wrote Hill, “is nothing more or less than the self-discipline necessary to help you take full and complete possession of your own mind.

horrified people are a riveted audience and advertisers like it that way.

“There is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way.”

It is impossible to work with a definite sense of purpose and be depressed at the same time. Carefully planned work will motivate you to do more and worry less.

The same principle is true for reprogramming our own dominant habits of thinking. If our dominant thought habit is pessimistic, all we have to do is dribble with the other hand: Think optimistic thoughts more and more often until it feels natural.

The overall pattern won’t change after just a few positive bounces of the brain. If you’re a pessimist, your biocomputer has been programmed heavily in that direction. But it doesn’t take long before a new pattern can emerge. As a former pessimist myself, I can tell you it really happens, slowly but surely. You do change. One thought at a time. If you can bounce it one way, you can bounce it the other.

It isn’t important how fast you are doing it. What’s important is that you are doing it.

But the paradox is that the slower you start something, the faster you will be finished.

The people you spend time with will change your life in one way or another.

It’s okay to start being more careful about to whom we give our time.

a list of friends and acquaintances in whose company you feel more alive, happier, more optimistic. Pick one whom you will spend some time with this week.”

Kierkegaard once said, “If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never.”

You are the thinker who determines who you will be. How you act is who you become.

You’ll gather energy and inspiration by being the character you want to play.

The best way to truly understand the world is to remove yourself from it. Psychic entropy—the seesaw mood swing between boredom and anxiety—occurs when you allow yourself to become confused by massive input.

isn’t any feeling you can get on drugs,” he said “that you can’t get without drugs.”

Most people don’t realize how easily they can create the social fearlessness they want to have. Instead, they live as though they were still teenagers, reacting to the imagined judgments of other people. They end up designing their lives based on what other people might be thinking about them. A life designed by a teenager! Would you want one? You can leave that mind-set behind. You can motivate yourself by yourself, without depending on the opinions of others. All it takes is a simple question. As Emerson asked, “Why should the way I feel depend on the thoughts in someone else’s head?”

You can create a self that doesn’t care that much about what people think.

Look bad. Take a risk. Lose face. Be yourself. Share yourself with someone. Open up. Be vulnerable. Be human. Leave your comfort zone. Get honest. Experience the fear. Do it anyway.

Use your comfort zones to rest in, not to live in. Use them consciously to relax and restore your energy as you mentally prepare for your next challenge. But if you use comfort zones to live in forever, they become what rock singer Sting calls your “soul cages.” Break free. Fly away.

difference between creating and reacting.

Plan your day the way Bill Walsh planned his football games. See the tasks ahead as plays you’re going to run. You’ll feel involved in your life at its very essence, because you’ll be encouraging the world to respond to you. If you don’t choose to do that, the life you get won’t be an accident. As an old Jewish folk saying puts it, “A person who does not make a choice makes a choice.”

This is a difficult recommendation for adults to follow, though, because adults have become accustomed to using their imaginations for only one thing: worrying. Adults visualize worst-case scenarios all day long. All their energy for visualization is channeled into colorful pictures of what they dread.

What they don’t comprehend is that worry is a misuse of the imagination. The human imagination was designed for better things.

Forget the literal attainment of your dream for now. Focus on just going for it. By simply going for the dream, you make yourself come true.

The world’s best-kept secret is that on the other side of your fear, there is something safe and beneficial waiting for you.

General George Patton said, “Fear kills more people than death.” Death kills us but once, and we usually don’t even know it.

But fear kills us over and over again, subtly at times and brutally at others.

I wanted to be a public speaker more than anything. My dream was to teach people everywhere to learn the ideas that lead to self-motivation, the ideas that I had learned. But how could I ever do this if stage fright left me frozen with fear?

“Run toward your fear! Run right at it!”

“The greater part of courage is having done it before,” and that soon became true of my speaking in public.

Fear of doing it can only be cured by doing it.

And soon my confidence was built by doing it ...