Top 10 ways to improve motivation

These are my top ten tips on how you can improve your motivation and find inspiration.

10. Always think positive
I was asked recently whether I thought thinking positively could affect your success in life, and I answered, “Absolutely!” without hesitation. Not only does your attitude affect your creativity and productivity, it also affects the impressions that other people have of you. I’m convinced that people who are determined to be positive are presented with more opportunities. Which people would you invite to a party first? Probably not the ones who will drag the atmos down.

9. Take time to look at your progress in retrospect
It’s easy to lose sight of your own progress. Take language study, for example. When you get to a relatively advanced level, your improvement comes in smaller and smaller steps. When you first started, you were absorbing new vocabulary like a sponge. Well of course you should be - Every word is new. Now that your pace has slowed down, it can almost feel like you’re flat-lining. You’re not, though. Think about yourself a couple months before, and you’ll realize that you’ve been edging up the slope all along.

8. Make it a friendly competition
In university, the classes I typically did the best in weren’t necessarily the classes that I was completely interested in. I found that taking a class with a friend served as motivation in the form of friendly competition. Find someone who shares a similar goal as you and make a race out of it. Don’t forget to share your progress with each other.

7. Take control of yourself
Don’t let impulse control your actions. Some people are more impulsive than others. I’m naturally impulsive myself. That’s why I had to work on controlling myself to get things done. My problem would manifest itself in two forms: Procrastination and distraction. I would always tell myself, “I’ll just make one more quick round of email checks and blog feeds before I get started on my work.” I knew what I was doing. I was hard-selling myself on lazy fun. Now I use the lazy fun as a reward for a job well done, instead. I became my own master.

6. Look for inspiration
There’s a lot of it out there. Read stories about people who were in the same situation as you. Look for unconventional wisdom in the media. Read quotes by people who spent their lives thinking instead of vegging out. Watch a couple of kids build a sand castle. Whatever it is that sparks that flame of passionate creativity within you - Get out and expose yourself to it as much as you can; daily if possible.

5. Take one step at a time
You can’t climb a staircase in one fell swoop. Take it one step at a time, and make sure you don’t trip on the way up. Set mini-goals for yourself instead of getting caught in the blazing headlights of The Ultimate Goal (whatever it may be for you). What can you accomplish today? Focus on that. We’ll think about tomorrow when tomorrow comes. What can you accomplish in one month? We’ll estimate that by our daily accomplishments a little bit later. What can you accomplish in one year? We’ll consider that after a couple of months of progress.

4. Limit your time spent on any thing
Whether it’s something you want to do, or something you don’t want to do. I’ve got an article in progress about this topic that goes into a little more detail, but as a general overview: Set a minimum and maximum timebox for things that you have to do (I call this a flexible timebox), and only a maximum timebox for things that you want to do (an inflexible timebox). Set out your days into chunks of time that you can fully utilize.

3. Blog it
Map your progress in any goal. Refer back to your past entries every now and then. Make it a habit to log your time spent in any endeavor. Find other people who blog about the same thing that you do and exchange links. A small blog community has the same motivation drive that (#8) a friendly competition does.

2. Don’t measure yourself against other people
We all progress along different paths, so it’s counterproductive to compare yourself with others, especially if you’re not in the same league. I used to have this problem. I’d see some people basking in glory, and here I was still trudging through the mud. But you’ve got to be able to differentiate between (#6) finding inspiration. It’s one thing to admire someone and use their success to motivate yourself, but you’re going to take a huge negative hit if your goal is clouded by jealousy and disappointment in your own progress.

1. Just do it
In the end, it’s really as simple as that. Dive right into it. Stop planning and start doing. Don’t hesitate. If you don’t immediately succeed, at least you learned from the experience. If you do succeed, well there you go.