Motivation Articles, Essays, Tips and Advice

Anyone interested in getting better results, becoming more productive and ultimately more successful should probably take an honest look at the problem of procrastination.

Most people think procrastination is just an issue that involves putting things off that can be done later without much of a penalty.  That idea just scratches the surface of the procrastination issue and  is indicative of the denial people have about it.

Truthfully, procrastination is like an addiction because it is the symptom of a thinking problem and like any other addiction, its difficult to break!

The reality is this: Nothing marginalizes results more than procrastination because being productive and getting superior results is about completing tasks and projects in reduced time frames.

Obviously, if you can get more work done in less time, you will see results much faster. We are all guilty of procrastination to some extent, and there are two kinds:

1. Positive Procrastination.  This is when you legitimately need some “mental percolation” time to gather your thoughts and get clear on what you need to do.

2. Negative Procrastination. This is based on some pretty flimsy excuses to avoid doing something, which will ultimately affect your results in negative ways.

Whereas Positive Procrastination can be beneficial, Negative Procrastination is something you need to overcome in order to be more effective and finish things faster.  You can’t produce results until you start doing something. If you do nothing, that is exactly what you will get — nothing!

If you want to accelerate results, there is no room in your life or your business for Negative Procrastination. Show me a person who consistently gets less than stellar results, and I’ll show you a person who procrastinates. However, they probably won’t think of themselves as procrastinators because they have lots of seemingly good reasons for not doing things today.

You may find some of the following statements familiar. You have probably either heard them from other people, or you may have even believed one or more of them yourself. If you feel a personal kinship with these statements, I suggest that you give serious thought to the possibility that there might be a touch of procrastination in your own life. Consider the following statements:

1. “I can do it tomorrow.” This may be the most popular and frequently used justification for procrastination. The reason it’s so popular is because tomorrow sounds so close to today.

Waiting until tomorrow just doesn’t seem like that big a deal. Just waiting one more day won’t upset too many people, and there are surely many good reasons that can be created to justify the delay.

2. “I don’t have everything I need, so I’ll wait.” This is a very popular statement used to justify inaction and waiting. It is most often an excuse that salespeople use to avoid making telephone calls to prospects.

The truth is that you can always take some kind of action, regardless of the list of the things you think you need before you can start. All you have to do is be honest about it and look for what is possible to do today. Do not wait until you have everything you think you need before you start doing things.

3. “I can’t do it perfectly, so I’ll wait.” This excuse doesn’t make much sense if you ask yourself the question: Can we ever do anything perfectly? I think not.

How do you feel about this statement? Do you feel as though you have to be able to perform perfectly before you can be willing to act? If you do have this attitude, you are in serious trouble, because you will never be able to do anything perfectly.

4. “I don’t have time right now.” Why and how do we get the idea that we have to be able to finish something before we can work on it? Let me use a book-writing example to show you what I mean by this.

A non-fiction book is a collection of chapters. Each chapter is a collection of ideas about a specific topic. Each idea may have many sub-points. When I begin a book project, how many books would I complete if I believed I had to finish the entire book in one, continuous work session?

The answer is that I would never complete any book project if I believed this was necessary.  The correct approach is to do what you can, when you can!

5. “Someone else can do it better.” This excuse is a silent one that people make to themselves privately. Some authors and psychologists say that procrastination is rooted in the fear of success. I’m not a psychologist, but I think it’s more likely people fear failure more than they fear success.

Let’s face it — people don’t want to look bad, and they are hesitant to put themselves in position where they might fail.

Procrastination is a tool that many people use because they falsely believe it will save them from failure. The truth is that procrastination usually guarantees failure.

Procrastination may be many things, but mostly it’s a bad habit. Someone once said, “Repetition strengthens and confirms.” Simply put, this means that the more you do something, the easier it gets!

I believe people learn how to procrastinate over a long period of time, and the more they do it, the easier it becomes. So, if you want better results and greater success, take a look at the issue of procrastination in your life.

Sit down today and make a list of all the things you need to do that you have not completed.  How many are the result of procrastination?  You might be surprised.

(c)2008 Tony Jeary, author of Strategic Acceleration: Succeed at the Speed of Life
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Tony Jeary, author of Strategic Acceleration: Succeed at the Speed of Life, has been and continues to be the coach to the world’s top CEOs and high achievers for more than 20 years. An advisor to many, Tony Jeary has invested his life and career in helping others discover new clarity for their vision, develop focus on direction, and create powerful execution strategies that strategically impact achievement and results. Visit Tony Jeary at TonyJeary.com

-What are some ways you go about keeping procrastination under control in your life?

*brought to you by GetMotivation.com

“If you want to be a writer, you have to write.”

I was 16 years old when my father said those kind-and-cruel words to me. I never forgot them. The first time I can remember wanting to be a writer, I was 11 or 12 years old. Back then, I had no idea that there was such a thing as copywriting – the kind of writing that would eventually make me a very rich man. I just wanted to be a writer. Any sort of writer.

I’d written a poem for Sister Mary Something at school. My rhyming quatrain (AABB) was titled, pretentiously, “How Do I Know the World Is Real?”

I was at the kitchen table when my father started reading it over my shoulder. I felt anxious. My father was a credentialed writer, an award-winning playwright, a Shakespearean scholar, and a teacher of literature, including poetry.

I’d seen him, on Saturday mornings, hunched over student essays, muttering and occasionally reading out loud passages to my mother that sounded perfectly good to me but elicited derisive laughter from them.

My father understood the secret-to-me clues of good writing. I didn’t feel at all comfortable having my fragile young poem exposed to the awesome danger of his critical mind. So there I sat, hoping he would go away. But he didn’t. I felt his hand on my shoulder, gentle and warm. “You may have a talent for writing,” he said.

I wrote a lot of things in the months that followed, and began to think of myself as a writer. I liked that feeling. But soon other interests – touch football, the Junior Police Club, girls – crowded themselves into my life.

Gradually, I wrote less and less. I still yearned to be a writer and so I began to feel guilty about not writing. To assuage my guilt, I promised myself that my other activities were “life experience,” and that I needed life experience to become the good writer I wanted to be.

In developing this excuse for not writing, I was building a structure of self-deception that many people live inside when they abandon their dreams. From the outside, it looks like you are doing nothing. But from the inside, you know that you are in the process of becoming, which, you convince yourself, is the next best thing to being.

That was the shape of my delusion when my father said, “If you want to be a writer, you have to write. A writer is someone who writes.” So many people live their lives failing to become what they want to be because they can’t find the time to get started.

How many times have you heard someone say that, one day, they will do what they always wanted to do – travel the world or paint paintings or read the classics? And when you hear sentiments like those, what do you feel? Happy because you are confident that one day they will accomplish their long-held goal? Or sort of sad for them because you are pretty sure they never will?

And what about you? How does this apply to your goal of becoming a successful copywriter?

I give aspiring copywriters the same advice my father gave me. “Copywriters write copy,” I tell them. And by that, I’m saying two things:

• You lose the right to call yourself a copywriter when you stop writing copy.
• You can regain the title the moment you start writing copy again.

If you spend a while ruminating on this, you may find it both disturbing and liberating.

Back when I was 16 and deluding myself about becoming a writer, my father’s advice was disturbing. I wanted him to say that the way to become a writer was to read books about writing and then take courses on writing and then perhaps become an apprentice to a writer and then begin writing little bits here and there. And that, finally, after 3 or 10 years of education, preparation, and qualification, I would somehow automatically be a writer.

But as long as I was studying writing or preparing myself to be a writer – and yet not actually writing – I wasn’t a writer. It was as simple as that.

Lots of people feel that they can keep their dreams alive and derive some of the ego satisfaction they hope their dreams will give them simply by living in a state of becoming. “I am not yet the person I want to become, but so long as I continue to express a wish to become that person, I keep that possibility alive and deserve credit for doing so.”

To become a copywriter, the first thing you have to do is refuse to accept any psychological credit for wanting to be one. After the initial disappointment of giving up the delusion that becoming is as good as being, you’ll have no choice but to jump over the becoming stage and simply be.

You do that by writing copy. Every day. The easiest way to become something special is also the fastest: Just start doing it. Don’t wait for the “right” time. Don’t worry about not being qualified. And don’t worry about getting paid for it. Just start doing it.

You want to become a musician? Play that piano.
You want to become a basketball player? Shoot those hoops.
You want to become a copywriter? Write copy.
Don’t spend another minute talking about what you will do … one day.
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Can You Write a Simple Letter?
Five years ago, Paul Hollingshead tossed out his old life. He went from making $6.50 an hour to making $400,000 a year working part time from anywhere he wants – AWAI’s Accelerated Program for Six-Figure Copywriting can help you do the same.

-I think there’s a great lesson in this article for anyone who wants to move in a particular direction. Take action. I hear a lot of people say, “I’ll go for my dream when the timing is right.” The problem is that more often than not the key to achieving in any given endeavor is found in getting started, and allowing life to teach us the lessons we need to learn along the way. Think about that the next time you find yourself putting off what you know you should be doing… Remember, it’s your life, LIVE BIG! Josh Hinds

*brought to you by GetMotivation.com

A life spent making mistakes is not only more honourable, but more useful, than a life spent doing nothing. — George Bernard Shaw

According to Global Entrepreneurial Monitor (GEM) fear of failure is the top reason given in Ireland and worldwide by aspiring entrepreneurs for not starting their own businesses.

NESTA – the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts and the UK’s largest early stage investor in innovative and creative businesses – found that almost three quarters of people who said they had what they believed was a good business idea were not acting on it because they were afraid of not succeeding.

Ironically on further examination it is obvious that all would-be entrepreneurs are being paralysed by something that doesn’t exist. That’s right. Failure is a myth!

Entrepreneurial Development – Failure Brings you Closer to Success!

Thomas Edison, inventor of the light bulb famously said “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.”

It took James Dyson, the engineer who reinvented the vacuum cleaner, four and a half years and 5,127 prototypes to refine his design.

“Each failure taught me so much,” he said. “Success teaches you nothing. Failures teach you everything. Making mistakes is the most important thing you can do.”

In an interview with Time Magazine, Larry Page, inventor of Google, said, “Invariably we try ten things that don’t quite work out in order to do one thing that is successful. And we learn a lot in doing the ten things that didn’t quite work.”

Thus every failure brings you a step closer to success and moves you further down the path of entrepreneurship.

Ironically by embracing this truism you mastered your first two major challenges in life – walking and talking.

Remember: As a child, ‘Never say die’, ‘Have no fear’, ‘Try and try again’, ‘Enjoy the moment’, were your working metaphors.

You fixed your eye on the goal, took your first step – wobbled a bit – steadied yourself. Then another step. Then landed on your backside!

What happens then? Did you give up? Did you say to yourself ‘I tried my best and I can’t do it. It hurts. I’m never doing that again!’? Did your ego kick in and start whispering ‘you’re making a fool of yourself. They’re all laughing at you! Better quit while you are ahead.’?

No indeed, as each one of us is born with an innate desire to reach our full potential, so you got up and tried again ultimately succeeding.

Model off your childlike strategies in the future and master the art of entrepreneurship.
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Kevin Kelly, Motivational Speaker and Best Selling Author KevinKellyUnlimited.com

-Share your thoughts on the above article in the comments section below.

*brought to you by GetMotivation.com