Your thoughts are always appreciated here on Pick The Brain. Great article – thanks for bringing my attention to it.

The post is titled, “Self-Motivation & Other Hyper-Intentional Mistakes:” URL:
http://financialphilosopher.typepad.com/thefinancialphilosopher/2008/06/self-motivation-other-hyper-intentional-mistakes.html

I’m not necessarily making an extended effort to win the book but an effort to clarify my thoughts and to simply say “thank-you” for provoking thought, as always…

Cheers…

Kent (aka The Financial Philosopher)

1. Enviousness – One must be careful with this. This gets the job done only if you use the energy to create better results than the person next to you. To be the best, you need to be envy to others who are still ahead. On the downside, this may harm you if you try to ruin the work of others instead of you “beating the competition”.

Easy to do in the morning: What / who I want to win today.

2. Mission – if you like something or someone enough to help without any reward in mind, you are most propably very motivated. You have a mission. Downside is that you really cannot make every task a personal mission.

Sometimes you just have to do it.

3. 5 minute rule – Sometimes you have to just “start doing it”. Make a 5 minute deal with yourself: “I’ll do this for five minutes and then take break”. Five minutes is so short time, anybody can do it. Only five minutes. It is not too bad. After 5 minutes you can move along or take break… or you find our yourself taking care of the whole task and don’t stop until 8 hours has passed.

This 5 minute rule also applies to those of you who would like to quit smoking. When you have desire for a smoke, wait for 5 minutes. Most propably your need for a smoke will fade away. Just wait for 5 minutes. It’s easy.

One thing that I try to remind myself is that I don’t have to wait until I feel motivated to do something. Often when you just start going through “the motions” you get into whatever you are doing. This particularly helped me while I was in school. If I waited for when I felt like doing homework, it would never have happened. But I had a rule to work on it for at least 10 minutes. Once I started my timer and got to work, I would feel motivated and most of the time I would continue working WAY past the 10 minutes.

Right now, my personal main challenge in terms of motivation is getting started on days which have no time structure set by external events. When I can spend all of the day’s time freely, my mind tends to wander and I often find myself spending the entire morning sitting in front of the computer surfing the net aimlessly, just to avoid starting the seemingly “unpleasant” task.

In order to maintain high levels of motivation on those days, I have devised four habits which really help me in getting my inner drive back on a daily basis.

1. While still lying in bed, repeat some nice affirmations.

One sentence does wonders for me, and it is this: “Today is the most important day in my life, because only today I can act.” When I repeat this a few times in my head, I already get the urge to stand up and do something.

2. Write down your goals – every day, first thing in the morning.

I had heard about the importance of thinking on paper for several years before I actually tried it myself. Immediately I was blown away by the intensity of it. Writing down my most important goals, long- and short-term, increased my feeling of “YES, I REALLY REALLY WANT THIS TO HAPPEN” tenfold, compared to merely thinking about them.

3. Good old NLP.

Whenever I notice myself actually being motivated, in a big or small way, I stop and pay attention to the qualities of that feeling. Where (in my body or mind) does it start? Is it a picture, a sound or a feeling in my body? After that, I make the pictures bigger and brighter, the sounds louder and clearer, or let the feelings cycle through my entire body. And lo and behold: the stronger I make this representation, the stronger the actual feeling of motivation becomes also.

4. Don’t start the computer for at least an hour after waking up.

This may seem trivial, and Peter has also already pointed this out in another post, but as an IT student (and geek), it’s quite natural for me to head towards the computer directly after standing up in the morning. By forcing myself not to use the computer before I have written out my goals in detail, I make sure to focus my thoughts first and to avoid wandering around aimlessly through the internet.

Hope this helps a bit