Motivation is a strange beast. When you have it, life seems great and the world is your oyster. When you are unmotivated, however, even the simplest of tasks can be a struggle to complete.

Lack of motivation is something that I often have to deal with, and I know I am not alone (one of our biggest sources of traffic comes via people Googling “motivation“).

So today I am interested to hear your own personal methods for motivating yourself. Is it something as simple as a song? Or, are you driven by something much deeper and personal? Please share tips and tactics for motivating yourself in the comments below.

Book Giveaway

We have 10 copies of Good in a Room: How to Sell Yourself (and Your Ideas) and Win Over Any Audience to give away. In this book Stephanie Palmer, former MGM Director of Creative Affairs, reveals the techniques used by Hollywood’s top writers, directors and producers to get financing for their projects. It also explains how you can apply these techniques to be more successful in your own high-stakes meetings as well as in other areas of your professional life

Check out the Amazon reviews if you want to know more about the book – it is not often you see everyone giving a book 5 stars! To be in the running just leave a comment below. We’ll announce the recipients sometime next week.

Link Karma

Here are some articles that John and I have enjoyed this week:

• The Red Pill: 10 Films Guaranteed to Blow Your Mind
• 10 Super Creative Uses for Everyday Things That You Already Have
• Knowledge; The Jeckyll and Hyde Inside Our Mind
• Beat High Gas Prices This Summer With A Stacation
• Our Life Journey: Break Free From Limiting Beliefs
• Running and Finishing the Excellence Mile! – Part 1 of 2
• What Makes a Good Life?
• The Knowing-Doing Gap

“Everything, a bird, a tree, a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable” – Eckhart Tolle

Life is a miracle. And yet so many of us have become deadened to this simple idea. We mistakenly believe that because we know the word for items – a bird, a tree, a stone, a human being, etc – that we actually know these items. Nothing could be further from the truth. Even the most common everyday items hold unfathomable depth, which is why Eckhart Tolle says that they are ultimately unknowable.

Here is a test: stop reading this for a moment and take a look at your surroundings. Now, when you were looking around did you fully appreciate what was in front of your eyes? If, for example, you are sitting in your living room did you notice the details of the furniture? Did you consider the technology that makes your plasma television possible? Or, did you quickly scan your eyes around across the room and, in doing so, subconsciously attaching a label to each item (eg “chair”, “television”, etc)?

Most of us would have done the latter. And in doing so, we have covered up the mystery of life with a label. Of course this is pretty harmless in the simple example given. But consider for a moment if this is the way in which we always see the world. As Tolle says in his book A New Earth: “the quicker you are in attaching verbal or mental labels to things, people, or situations, the more shallow and lifeless your reality becomes, and the more deadened you become to reality, the miracle of life that continuously unfolds within and around you.”

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I believe it is important to separate good failures from bad failures. Good failures happen when, even though you made the correct decision, you still lost. Bad failures happen because you made bad decisions, or worse, didn’t make a decision at all. Although the two feel the same, they have a completely different long-term impact.

I’m a novice poker player. One of the first things I learned was that there were good wins and bad wins. Good wins were because you had a sound strategy of betting where the odds were in your favor. Bad wins happened when you just got lucky. Going all-in on a 2-7 off-suit might win the hand. But it doesn’t mean you’re a good poker player.

Good Failures

Mentally separating good failures from bad failures takes work. Poker is a simple game where the laws of probability are cleanly defined. Real life is a lot messier. It takes more effort to decide which failures were because of a bad decision and which were just the unintended side-effects of the best choice available.

Although it can be difficult to separate the two, there are benefits to making two piles instead of just one. By separating the two types of failures, it is easier to persevere through good failures. It may hurt to have your business proposal shut down for the fifteenth time, but it isn’t necessarily a bad failure.

By separating the two, you can also avoid more bad failures. If you fail because of laziness, indecision or poor planning, you can quickly correct those in the future. Knowing the difference between good and bad failures keeps you from repeating stupid mistakes.

Types of Good Failures

I’ve found that there are several categories of good failures. These are the kinds of failures you might actually seek out. Since they come from good, not bad, decisions, they are the best way to fail.

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PickTheBrain has lead me to a new job with a company named PeopleJam (I’ll be sharing the story soon). As part of my duties as head of online marketing, I’ll be writing articles on PeopleJam and sharing them here when they’re relevant.

The first such article is all about maintaining a youthful body as you get older by eating right and getting the right kinds of exercise. Head over and check it out.

If you like the post, do me a favor and give the article a digg.

Is your life ruled by love or by fear? Love and fear are opposite emotional attitudes that shape our life in very different ways. The psychoanalyst John McMurray describes the difference like this:

“The fear-determined have no sun in themselves and go about putting out the sun in other people. The love-determined have life in them, abundant life. They are the people who are really alive, of whom it can be said that they possess eternal life as a well within them perpetually.”

Life is a lot more beautiful and vivid if it is determined by love and not by fear. I’m sure you can imagine that someone determined completely by love would be a kind of saint. In contrast, most of us ordinary human beings are determined by both forces, love and fear. However, in my experience, even a tiny shift towards love—and away from fear—can bring a lot more happiness.

Here are 7 tips that you can move towards love and away from fear.

1. Cultivate gratitude

Gratitude makes us feel happier. If you remember to be grateful for the blessings of your life, you start to feel more connected to yourself and others. When you let go of niggles and embrace gratitude instead, love springs up.

2. Reality-test your fear

Sometimes fear can be like a cloud that keeps out the sunlight. Then everything feels huge and oppressive. A simple way to deal with fear is to test its reality. Write down three things that you are afraid of. Then look at each point and ask yourself, “Is this fear really grounded in reality?” I know that when I do this, I often find that my fears are unfounded. It’s like living in a shadow-land, peering into the future and expecting bad things to happen.

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“You cannot buy peace; you must know how to manufacture it within, in the stillness of your daily practises in meditation.”

Sometimes it is necessary to step back and realize how stressed we are. If we are not careful, stress can creep up on us and we will become unhappy without realizing it. However, once we are aware of how stressful our lives are, then we can take steps to reduce it. Nothing is as valuable as inner peace; but, it is not something we can buy – it is something we have to cultivate ourselves.

1. Relaxation Exercises

The state of your body will have an effect on your mind and vice versa. If you body is tense, it is reflection of your stressful mind. Learning to relax the body can be a helpful way to reduce stress. A very simple relaxation exercise is to tense and relax your muscles. Concentrate on a particular area and tense the muscles. Then let go of all tension and try to feel as relaxed as possible; feel all the stress and tension leaving the body. Try lifting up an arm, if it drops with a thud this is a sign that you are relaxed; if there is resistance this is a sign of tension.

2. Physical Exercise

We were not built to spend 15 hours a day sitting in front of the TV, driving a car and sitting at a desk. If we do no exercise and are lethargic, life becomes unbalanced. Taking physical exercise gives great relief both mentally and physically. Exercise releases different chemicals which contribute to a feeling of well being. It is also an opportunity to clear the mind and concentrate on something completely different. Often when we are stressed, the idea of exercise doesn’t sound appealing; it is easy to think of excuses like “I don’t have time”. But, here we are making a mistake; we need to make time and once we try we will definitely appreciate the benefits of exercise.

3. Deal with One Thing at A Time

When we have several demands on our time we feel stressed. It is easy to feel overwhelmed by demands placed on our time. The secret is to deal with one problem at a time and do what we can to improve the situation. When we have taken the necessary steps we can forget about it and move on to the next thing. Either take appropriate action or leave it. But, don’t just worry helplessly.

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Many of us are carrying a few extra pounds. Perhaps they’ve crept on gradually over the years, perhaps they’re the “Freshman 15”, or perhaps they’ve been present since early childhood.

It is easy to get complacent. Okay, we know we could do with losing that extra weight, but the thought of dieting and exercise just seems like too much hard work – it’s not going to make much difference, is it?

Since my late teens, I’ve lost nearly a third of my body weight (50 lbs). The knock-on effect on the rest of my life has been dramatic, and if you’re carrying an extra 10, 20 or 50 lbs, you too could gain all of this by losing them:

Instant Confidence Boost

For those who are naturally shy or awkward in social situations, being overweight makes things far worse. Do you covertly glance around a group of friends or colleagues to see if you’re the largest person in the room? Do you struggle to find outfits that flatter your figure – and resort to shapeless clothes which hide as much of you as possible?

Whether you just want to blend in with the crowd, and not stand out as bigger than all your friends, or whether you’d like to be the center of attention for once, feeling good about your body is a direct shortcut to build your confidence.

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“There is a total incompatibility between the joy of reading, a vagabond experience, and the experience of reading in order to answer questions, and explain what you understood.” - Rubem Alves, Brazilian educator.

What is most likely to influence your success at school or at a job? The ability to read well. And that goes for your kids too. The declining literacy of our society has been a major concern of educators for a while now, and yet things are not getting better. One reason might be a failure to recognize that reading and literacy are personal skills, best acquired when associated with pleasure.

In most cases, how well we learn to read will depend largely on our exposure to language as children. If we hear people around us talking about a wide variety of subjects as children, we naturally pick up the words and phrases they use. If we pick up a lot of words, we will have an advantage when we start reading, and we will learn to read better. This, in turn, helps us to acquire more words, leaving the poor readers, who know few words, further and further behind. The literacy divide usually begins early in life, and can only be overcome by lots of reading later in life.

Much of the traditional advice to struggling readers, these days, seems to involve developing “cognitive strategies”. In this approach, readers are asked to focus more, to think, to be curious and ask questions, to analyze, to predict, to infer, and to monitor their understanding, or worse still to answer questions on their comprehension of what they have read. In other words they are asked to become self-conscious readers.I do not agree with this approach.

Here are my seven strategies for reading improvement.

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Some opportunities are big, noisy and easy to notice. If someone came up to you and offered you a million dollar check, that would certainly grab your attention. However, some opportunities, that are just as important, are relatively hard to see. These doorway opportunities are can completely change your life, but you need to know how to find them.

Think of a doorway. Until you open the door, everything on the other side is concealed. Unless you know from experience what lies on the other side, you can never be entirely sure. Doorway opportunities in life are similar in that you can’t see them until you actually take a first step.

Examples of Doorway Opportunities

My first Toastmasters meeting was a doorway opportunity. I had gotten the idea to attend Toastmasters on a whim. I didn’t know anybody in the club, but I was interested in improving my public speaking skills. After I went to my first meeting, I was hooked. The people were great and I learned a lot. I’ve since won two awards, participated in speaking contests and even been on the radio for my involvement in our club.

Doorway opportunities have a similar theme. They start off appearing unimportant or only mildly interesting. Then, when you start getting involved, they have a huge payoff. Toastmasters was just one such opportunity, I’ve had similar events from dropping a chance email to someone I didn’t know or setting up a new passive income stream for my business.

Are You Closing Doors Without Realizing It?

The idea that struck me hardest after seeing so many doorway opportunities was the realization of just how many I was missing. If a few small, insignificant seeming actions could lead to huge opportunities, how many doors was I unintentionally closing?

You might have dozens of doorways surrounding you right now, but you just don’t realize it. Because these opportunities don’t look like winning the lottery, it is easy to disregard them. To say you don’t have the time or energy to pursue them. If they weren’t in hiding, and really did look like million dollar checks, you probably wouldn’t have trouble finding the time and energy to grasp them.

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No matter what your age, throughout your life you will be learning. Your formal education ends with high school, but for many the learning never ends. You may attend a university, trade school, night school, community college or adult school. You may enhance your knowledge via business seminars, lectures, books, e-courses, and whatever else shows up in our information society. So wouldn’t it be helpful to have some good study habits and some tools to increase your ability to learn?

Although you may not be studying information to get good grades, retention of what you are learning can help your career, your parenting skills, your business, your relationships, your hobbies, and so much more. So it makes sense to acquire good learning skills sooner than later. Skills such as speed reading and good comprehension are useful for all the great information you want to take in.

Here are some more secrets for improving your ability to learn. Most apply to classes, but you can adapt them to any learning situation.

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