Mikes Blog

Challenge energizes your life, pushing you to higher levels of creativity and resourcefulness. What can you do today to give yourself a nourishing measure of challenge?

Go somewhere you’ve never been. Learn something complicated and useful.

Engage in a friendly, substantive conversation with someone who disagrees with you. Undertake a task that requires more focus and discipline than you’ve previously been willing to invest.

The more challenge you experience, the more challenge you can handle. And that’s an essential skill for any kind of achievement.

Whatever you seek to create, to become, to acquire, to undertake, you’ll work through challenge to get there. Get good at challenge and you set yourself up to make great progress.

Willingly choose to give yourself more experience at working through challenge. You’ll develop strengths and skills that can serve you in every part of life.

— Ralph Marston

THE DAILY MOTIVATOR
Wednesday, August 7, 2019

Clear purpose
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What is the goal behind the goal? What is the fundamental desire that undergirds all other desires?

In order to achieve what you truly desire, you must know clearly what it is. Seeking a vague, generic objective can never produce satisfying results.

It’s easy, for example, to assume you want a lot of money. Yet in order to reach that goal you must be clear about why, precise about what you wish to do with that money.

Just because everybody else wants it, just because it sounds good, is not sufficiently motivating. Achievement requires long, difficult personal effort that must be driven by a well-defined personal purpose.

Understanding that purpose takes hard work, which leads in turn to even more hard work. It’s a serious investment, and can bring spectacular results when you give it ample respect and commitment.

Be clear about what you care about, what you love and value at the deepest level. Give yourself to it, filling each moment with purpose and filling your world with meaningful achievement.

— Ralph Marston

Problems are not the problem
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No situation is going to solve all your problems. But that’s okay, because the existence of problems is not really such a problem.

Much of what makes life good is the satisfaction of dealing with its problems. If there were no problems, such satisfaction would be impossible.

Go ahead and be thankful for the problems. Then get to work dealing with them in creative and enriching ways.

Let go of the fantasy that you can somehow make your way to a perfect utopia that’s free of all problems. Instead, use your creative energy to envision and implement ways to thrive and to spread joy even when problems keep cropping up.

Rather than letting the problems nag you and disappoint you, allow them to energize and inspire you. Appreciate the power they have to direct your focus toward what truly matters.

Look confidently out at life, and see every problem as an opportunity to enrich your experience. Then go out among those problems and reap the rich rewards of a life well lived.

— Ralph Marston

Take time
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Take time to appreciate the beauty and wonder that constantly surround you. Take time to create new, original value out of the resources at your disposal.

Take time to read the instructions, and to carefully follow all the steps. Take time to plan for tomorrow and beyond.

Take time to listen. Take time to offer the encouragement and support of your presence.

Take time to consider how thankful you are for the life you have. Take time to let the other people in your life know how important they are to you. 

Take time to offer kindness. Take time to understand.

Make use of your time for something other than being hurried, worried, and anxious. Take time, and spend it living well.

— Ralph Marston