Motivating Yourself to Greatness

Motivating Yourself to Greatness is Doable

Are you motivating yourself each day to achieve and accomplish the goals you’ve set for yourself?  The answer to this question will guide your life’s journey and change your life in untold ways.

I work with newer authors, marketers, and entrepreneurs and have discovered over almost two decades of mentoring that motivation must come from within.

While others can encourage, support, inspire, teach by example, and lead you in your quest for achieving goals and dreams, only you can push yourself over the top of any mountain by motivating yourself to greatness.

The questions you must ask yourself as you walk the path of the entrepreneur’s journey also include… “What is my motivation for wanting to build and grow an online business?”

When I began mentoring people who were seeking out a life and business around online entrepreneurship, authorship, and marketing and teaching them my proven strategies based on my experiences, I mistakenly assumed that they were motivated in the same way I was at the time: to earn enough income online to be able to replace what I had been making as a classroom teacher and working part-time in real estate during the previous twenty years. Not so, with many people who were coming to me for mentoring telling me that it was different for them.

Instead, I soon learned that people’s motivation for coming online included wanting to share a specific message with the world; having the desire to be a part of a community that was mostly online so they could step away from interacting in the physical world; and wanting to write a book to leave a legacy for their family and friends. This motivation is more intrinsic.

Intrinsic motivation is defined as the doing of an activity for its inherent satisfaction rather than for some separable consequence. When intrinsically motivated, a person is moved to act for the fun or challenge entailed rather than because of external products, pressures, or rewards.

Why am I sharing all of this with you today? Because I work best with people who are motivated to become authors, marketers, and online entrepreneurs in order to create multiple streams of income, with many of these being passive income streams.

Motivating Yourself is the First Step to Setting and Achieving Your Goals

Goal setting and achieving strategies were relatively new to me when I first began my online business in 2006. I had heard that writing down your goals, reviewing them regularly, and then “course correcting” as you got closer to implementing them would make a difference. But it would take the help of two mentors for me to actually internalize and then implement the power of these concepts.

Motivating yourself may seem like an insurmountable goal at first, but upon closer inspection you’ll find that it can be satisfying to know that you alone are capable of motivating yourself to greatness. Here’s a strategy I’ve used that may be helpful to you…

The Warren Buffet Strategy

This strategy has three steps:

Step 1: Write down your top twenty-five goals. This could be career goals, personal goals, weekly goals, annual goals, etc.)

Step 2: Go over your list and circle your top 5 goals. Make sure take some time with this part; don’t rush it!

STOP – Do NOT proceed to Step 3 until you have done the two steps above first.

Step 3: Now you essentially have two lists: the circled items are List A, and the remaining items are List B. So logically the next thing to do is start on your most important tasks.

Well, not exactly. Here’s the catch – Buffet says this, “Everything you didn’t circle just became your Avoid-At-All-Costs list. No matter what, these things get no attention from you until you’ve succeeded with your Top 5.”

For Step 3, you only want to focus on working on the items on List A.

Why this strategy works: Eliminating things you care about is the most difficult part of this productivity method. Those twenty items on List B are things you care about, just like the items on List A. They are tasks that important to you for one reason or another. It’s super easy to tell yourself that you’re being productive while spending time on those twenty tasks. But when you hold them up to your top five goals, those other tasks are simply distractions from your biggest goals. Spending your limited time on secondary priorities may just be the reason you still have twenty half-completed projects instead of five finished ones.

Motivating Yourself to Unlimited Income

Did you know that income is not all created equal? Like many people, I started with “earned” income when I was very young. This required me to work for an hour in exchange for being paid for that hour of my time. As a classroom teacher, I was salaried, meaning that I was paid a set amount every four weeks, no matter how many hours it took me to complete the work that needed to be done. The majority of people in the world are on the earned income model.

In real estate, I was on commission and paid when a transaction was completed. That was when I first learned about “portfolio” income, where you could invest in properties or stocks and bonds or something similar and then be paid on an ongoing basis without having to do any more work. The “catch” was that you had to come up with money to invest in order to get these streams of income in place and flowing.

When I came online in 2006, I quickly learned about “passive” and “residual” income, where you create something once and then get paid over and over again. This can be from information products, online courses, books, membership sites, and more. My goal is to help you to create something of value to others so you’ll have income coming in 24/7/365. Affiliate marketing is a big part of this income strategy. This is what we refer to as the internet marketing lifestyle and it’s easier than you may have imagined to set up.

Motivating yourself is a skill I encourage you to develop and practice. Think about your goals and the ways you would like to spend your time throughout each day. Perhaps you want to do more writing, or to travel, or to volunteer in your community. Whatever your dreams and goals may be, know that you can and will achieve them by maintaining focus and consistency in your daily life.

I’ve written a bestselling book around the concepts I’m sharing here… Self-Directed: Inspire, Motivate, and Empower Yourself to the Greatness That Lies Within could make a difference for your life experience.

I’m Connie Ragen Green, guiding you to achieving the greatness within by motivating yourself and following through with the ideas and actions that will move you closer to you goals and dreams.