Today’s entry starts with a person. It’s Alice. And Alice was sent to a motivational speech this morning, where the speaker talked about fulfilling her life purpose and make full use of her life. The speaker equipped her with all the right tools and her motivation is at the maximum level. So high that she is walking as fast as she can just to start doing her work.

People are actually noticing the change in her pace. She is finishing up all her work, and to their surprise, she even stays up until late at night to plan the for a presentation tomorrow. Truly a super worker.

Do you know what in her colleague’s mind when they saw her working that hard? It’s sad actually, but they are actually betting that all this momentum will be over in a week, two maximum. And you know what? For a reason that I will disclose later, I actually agree with them

Why do you think this happen? Like most people, she has failed to realize one of the biggest mistake we do when we are highly motivated. Allow me to elaborate.

The Mistake - She Expect Results Immediately
Succcess is not a one day thing. Realize this fact before you even attempt to being success. Alice may be working as hard as she can but if she expect to find job satisfaction overnight, she will be disappointed.

Just like a car, when it is first invented, it is just a box with wheel going downhill. Then the inventor wants to maneuvre the car and avoid all the trees, so he invented the steering. Then maybe it rains, so he put a roof on the box. For a car to be beautifully and efficiently designed takes hundreds of years and there’s so much more areas that we can improve.

Imagine improving our life.

So take your time improving your life. Be patient, in fact be very patient. As long as you are moving forward, you will reach there. I promise

How to avoid this mistake
1) Quantify your success
This may sounds like a fancy word but it really is not. People can always say “I want to be successful”. But when we asked them to define successful, I don’t think they will know the answer.

So find your answer. What is success to you. Maybe for Alice here, her success is to get an acknowledgment from her boss that she had done good. So once she know her definition of success, she will need to work on it. Maybe producing daily summary of work done, or proactively suggest ideas in a meeting.

She will be successful when the boss recognize her or know her name.

2) Aim for little success
This is the most important solution of all. You need to wake up everyday knowing that you will somehow be achieving your success that day. Imagine you waking up to the day you will be promoted the new General Manager of the company. Wouldn’t you be excited to work and perform even better?

That’s my friend is one of the secret to sustaining motivation. Aim for the little success everyday. For example, Alice will aim today to finish a job and handed it to the boss by hand. And when she does exactly that, she has succeeded in the day’s aim.

I’m sure she will continue this excellent quality through out her life if she wants to.

- Personal Note -
What’s your little aim for today?

Photo Credit - OmniNate

Related Post

• 6 Powerful Motivation Techniques For Spring Cleaning
• M Double B Double D H Attitude
• Exhausted After Vacation.. Here’s Why

It’s spring cleaning today in my house. And I must say that even though I’m cleaning the house on the go daily, when it’s time for spring cleaning, there are always a lot of things to do. It can be very demotivating to see so many things to do when you are already doing so much cleaning it on the go.

The amazing thing is these things to do are just small tasks that you can do immediately like putting away newspaper for recycling, or wiping up the dust on the furniture, or arranging the DVDs. Little things that somehow there’s so many of them, you just feel very very demotivated.

I don’t know about you but I find these techniques to be quite effective especially for motivating us to do all the tedious small tasks.

1) 100 Items And You’re Done
Whenever you are picking up socks or taking out the garbage. Count and shout the number of task you have done. An example -

You are picking up socks, shout “ONE!”
Then straight away do the garbage and shout “TWO!”

The rule is you must not stop unless you have done 100. I’m getting excited even writing about it

2) The Amazing Race “Insert Your House Here”
Cleaning the house is not a one time thing. You will be doing it for the rest of your life. Why not make it a race. Create a list of things to do and do all the thing on the list (duh!). But you will have to time how long it takes you to finish the list. For example you take 3 hours this week. Next week try to do the same task in 2.5 hours. If you break that record, make a big deal out of it. Go out at a fancy restaurant with your loved ones to celebrate.

I wouldn’t tell her what’s the occasion though.

3) Soundtrack Yourself
Burn a cd of songs that you really like. Play it while you’re cleaning. You can sing to it, you can even dance to it, but promise yourself that there will be no repeat for the playlist. When it’s over, it’s over. So motivate yourself by saying that if you can’t finish by the time the songs are over, you will have to do the work without any music.

Hopefully the fear of boredom will help clear the area a bit faster.

4) Attack The Giant First
Just like in war, we need constant motivation through out the war. In this war for cleanliness, it is recommended that you do the bigger thing first. For example, moving the heavy furniture. Do this first and the rest will feel like the easiest thing to do.

5) In-Law’s Visitting Scenario
This is actually my favorite. I noticed that I can clean the house faster and better when I keep convincing myself that my in-laws are coming. I notice this when they actually came to my house a few months ago. My house never looked cleaner.

6) The One-Minute Rule
This rule is actually proposed by Gretchen from The Happiness Project. According to the rule, anything that you can do in one minute time, should be done immediately. No question asked. For example, you come back after work and you see an umbrella misplaced. You can of course choose to ignore it and do other thing. But if you are applying the one minute rule, you will pick up the umbrella and put it to its rightful place. Why? Because it will only take you less than a minute to do that.

- I wonder -
Any other ideas on how to motivate ourselves doing those tedious little tasks?

———– Personal Note ———–
Now that we have a new member of the family, our daughter Zafirah. The mrs and I have come up with an agreement that one of us will have to look after Zafirah at any time. I’m telling you. A lot of my existing schedule were thrown out the window

But I’m more than happy to do that just to see her smile. Did I tell you that she is now smiling

Photo credit - Givepeasachance

Related Post

• Biggest Mistake Done While Being Motivated
• M Double B Double D H Attitude
• Exhausted After Vacation.. Here’s Why

Summary - You want something, go get it. Period!
MBBDDH is nothing new actually. It’s a negative attitude that may very well be the one thing that will bring us down irregardless of what area we are in. That I can assure you.

MBBDDH stands for “Maybe Busy, Better Don’t Disturb Him”.

Have you ever wanted to call a long lost friend but in the end, you just cancel it because you think that he may be busy, and you are only disturbing him? He may actually be wondering why nobody is calling him? In the end.. it’s everyone’s lost since the friendship is ruined.

MBBDDH is not an attitude specifically for calling long lost friend. We are actually doing that in most of the things in our life.

Example 1 - The Blackout.
The electrical supply to your house is cut off. you just leave it as it is thinking that somebody else may have called to report.

• Result - you spend half a day without any electricity.
• What you should do - Call the electrical company to report. They may be able to fix the trip in just a few minutes.

Example 2 - The Promotion
There’s a vacancy for a job superior than your position now. You don’t go to your manager for his recommendation, you just hope that they will know that you are qualified.

• Result - the human resource had employed another person for the job.
• What you should do - Get recommendation from your manager and go to human resource asking to be considered. You must promote yourself even though you consider yourself as a very popular employee

Example 3 - The Broken Heart
You like a girl, she seem to like you too. You befriend her, flirting every now and then but never officially tell her that you like her.

• Result - After one year of being friends, she think that you just want to be her friends. And she move on with another guy.
• What you should do - tell her that you like her.

Conclusion - I remember a quote from the movie “The Pursuit Of Happiness” which goes something like this - “If you want something, go get it. Period!”

That short sentence is one of the most effective words I’ve ever seen. When we want something, why do we let our shyness, or our fear to stand in our way. Those feeling will never help us achieve what we want, so why bother entertaining them. Toss them aside and just go ahead.

- I wonder -
Any other example of where MBBDDH attitude is used?

Photo Credit - Hamed Masoumi

Related Post

• Exhausted After Vacation.. Here’s Why
• Creating A Shortcut In Your Thinking Process
• One Of The Most Powerful Question Ever
• Increase Your Mind’s Awareness Ten Fold - Here’s How
• Integrating Gmail Into Your Mind In 5 Steps

I was cleaning my house yesterday. Well it has been left for quite some time so there’s a lot to clean. And it is very hard to keep that motivation up when there’s so much to do.

What I do is this..

I started with my bedroom. As always there will be things that I need to move from my room to another room. Maybe a travelling bag which was supposed to be in the store. Or my MP3 cds that were supposed to be kept in the car.

Here is where I learn something about sustaining motivation. I noticed that I can easily lose motivation if I immediately bring the items to its place. For example, if I found the MP3 cds in my room, and immediately brought them to the car, I will usually be more tired and often decide to postpone the whole cleaning to another time.

So I come up with a new system. When I clean the bedroom, I will just leave all the items to be removed from the room just outside the door. I just pile it up there. And when I finished with the room, I will start clean the next room and move the items to another room while putting a few of the items in its rightful place through out the process.

By the end of the day, I have cleaned the entire house, and all the items are put in place (My proudest moment)

Conclusion - So this is my theory. When you are working on something, put all other works outside the door. Just a few cm outside. It can pile up to be a mountain of stuff but that shouldn’t bother you because you are working on this side of the door.

If you entertain every additional work or those minor minor things that comes up while you’re working, you are already losing your motivation.

Our attention and concentration is not infinite. Just like money, if we spend it, we will be left with less money. Period. There’s no way a person who does 100 jobs in 24 hours will have better quality that a person who does 50 jobs in 24 hours.

- I wonder -
How do you keep your motivation sustained?

———– Personal Note ———–
As requested by Fairuzniza, I attached two very recent photos of Zafirah My new motivation in life

This is taken on 1st of June, She still had some level of Jaundice. But I just love this one

I think that should be her first smile ever in her life

Photo Credit - Tifotter

Related Post

• Ramadhan Tribute #1 - Welcome
• Did Allah Created Evil? NO!! Here’s Why
• How to Systemically Have Happier Days
• Perfectly Imperfect
• Personal Rant - My Wimax Quest At PC Fair

It’s been a while since I last answer questions from readers . A new friend of mine, Evan was discussing with me on an interesting topic, which is on how to stay motivated.

Basically Evan knows what he want and he wants to take control of his life, trying to get back in shape, get better grades and be more organized. However, the problem is after a while of working on that, he will lose motivation and everything’s back to square one. To start back the whole routine is very tiring. Where did he go wrong?

I’m not going to list down motivational tools. Instead I’m planning to go into an area not popularly approached but nevertheless equally important, which are the rules of staying motivated. Yes, there are rules.

How many of us actually read motivational books and blogs, or go to seminar and feeling all fired up to start gaining control of our life, when suddenly after a few weeks, we return back to our original condition, unmotivated and lazy.

I know I have.

This is what I think happened. There are two hidden rules in all motivation. Allow me to explain.

Rule 1 : You must want to feel motivated

All motivation require us to actually want to change. But what happen when we don’t actually like the feeling of motivated itself. Everything is already a failure even before we start.

You must first want to feel motivated. Not to change but to be motivated. Believe me, everything will change once you have that desire to feel motivated.

My personal suggestion is for you to have a mantra set in your mind. “I want to feel motivated” or “I love being motivated” should do the trick.

Rule 2 : Never Use Motivational Tools When You Are Not Complying Rule 1.

This is quite complex. But let me give you an example. Has any doctors ever told you that when you were prescribed with antibiotics, you should finish all of the medicine even though you are cured. Why? Because, by not finishing your antibiotics, the virus/germ will only be weaken and not completely killed. If they survived, they will become more immuned to the medicine. And that’s why sometimes you will need a stronger dosage of medicine.

The same goes to motivation. This is our medicine. However, if you really don’t want to feel motivated yet you still read those motivation stories for example, you will definitely not be motivated afterward since you just don’t want it.

In the end, slowly you will feel that these stories no longer work to motivate you. And you will start looking for other means to motivate you.

My personal suggestion is to only read motivational stories when you really want to be inspired. Don’t read them and then just procrastinate things. Do this : Whenever you read any motivational stories, get up immediately and do something about it. Don’t be immunized by not taking action immediately.

Hopefully this will weaken the virus inside

- I wonder -
What are your personal tips to stay motivated

——— Personal Note ———-
I always like to use the sand in a cup of water approach. Sand will always settle down at the bottom of the cup. We have no choice but to regularly stir the water to get the sand occupying the water volume evenly. The same goes to motivation and other things in life. It’s one of those thing that we must keep doing. The sand doesn’t stay float forever.

Oh ya, to everyone reading, feel free to contact me should you have any questions. I’m not claiming I will have the answers, but I will definitely offer my best insight on them

Related Post

• A Better Person
• One Mistake We Did In Conquering Fear
• How Some People Change Cars Every 5 Years
• Popular Proverb Explained By Children
• 2 Ways To Freedom In A Relationship