Motivation

So in my quest to defeat procrastination and find new motivation for moving toward my goals, I am reading Sam Horn’s Someday Is Not A Day In The Week; 10 Hacks to make the rest of your life the best of your life.

I’ve already found a great tip: Have a pretend SEE to give you a sense of urgency.

An SEE, he explains, is a “significant emotional event.” It’s something dramatic that forces us to reevaluate our lives – usually something bad, like illness or job loss. But hey, it could be good, like winning the lottery or finding out that you’re the lost heir to a fortune… (I like to dream. So sue me.)

But we don’t have to actually go through some life-altering event in order to harness the emotional juice that it could provide. According to Horn,

“Just ask yourself: If I only had a week to live, what would I stop doing? What would I start doing? What would I do differently?”

He argues that we shouldn’t think of this as morbid. Instead, consider it as motivation to stop taking the good things in our lives for granted – our health, our loved ones, and our freedoms.

This strikes me as a really worthwhile activity. It is shocking how easy it is to become blind to the blessings that surround us, until the day that we lose them.

On the other hand, once the shock has worn off, it’s easy to slip back into bad habits. Now that I’ve lived with diabetes for a couple of years, it’s hard to resist temptation when it shows up in the form of some tasty but unwise morsel. And it’s hard to generate the oomph necessary to get to the gym for an exercise class, when the health benefits are not easily visible.

I think the real goal in my life is to be happy and content. Enjoying the journey, as they say. Since that doesn’t exactly align with keeping my nose to the grindstone every minute of every day, I’m going to have to find a way to make proper eating and regular exercise fun and worthwhile, all on their own.

Eleanor Roosevelt’s definition of happiness (also noted in Sam Horn’s book) is as follows:

“Someone asked what I regarded as the three most important requirements for happiness. My answer: A feeling you have been honest with yourself and those around you; a feeling you have done the best you could in your personal life and work; and the ability to love others.”

I think that’s a pretty good definition, don’t you?