Motivation is Like Love: Coping When Your Passion Fades

We’ve all experienced it: that surge of powerful motivation at the start of a project.  We’re on top of the world and feel unstoppable.

Yet somehow, after a few weeks, that motivation high has gone. New blogs, new year’s resolutions to diet and workout routines can soon become burdens as we lose our enthusiasm for them.

From the time we embark on a new project until we are deeply entrenched in following through with it long term, we go through a few different changes and emotional highs and lows: fluctuations that aren’t so different than what we experience elsewhere in our lives.

Read on as we consider these parallels, and then, using lessons from our emotional lives, discuss strategies for coping when our enthusiasm for a project fades.

6 Things NCAA Football 09 Taught Me About Life

Want to play video games and learn lessons you can apply elsewhere in life? Look no fruther than NCAA Football 09, in Dynasty Mode.

In Dynasty mode, you coach a college football program through multiple seasons and you can only improve your team long term by mastering the recruitment process.  Read on as I discuss goal setting, priotization and persistence: all lessons learned from playing NCAA Football 09.

Altruism – One of the Keys to Happiness

Pop Quiz: What do you believe will make you happy?  A new car?  A promotion, a raise, perhaps?

While we all have different notions about what defines success and happiness, some common beliefs permeate our culture. One such belief is the ideal of the American Dream, the idea that anyone in the United States can achieve their goals, and material prosperity.

Society promotes the American Dream as an ideal to be aspired to – the type of life that we want to live, and the type of life we wish for our children.

Let’s take a step back and ask:  Will such a life, of achieving ones goals and material prosperity, ultimately make us happy?  And if not, what then are the keys the happiness?  Read on as we explore this question.

Can Virtual Assistants Make You More Productive? An Experiment, and a TimeSvr Review

In a previous post I discuss how I outsourced my cooking for $60 a week.   I decided to try an experiment with a virtual assistant, to see if I could effectively outsource parts of my digital life. I also compared my solo virtual assistant to a professionally managed, concierge style virtual assistant team.

I imagined I would be able to save some time with a virtual assistant. Further, I hypothesized that the team would do a better job than my solo assistant – but would be more expensive, and it would end up being a decision based on value provided.

Was I right? Read on to find out the results.

Simple Time Saving Tip #62 – Stop Self Inflicted Junk Email

When you first discovered that great website of Cat Pictures, you thought it was the best thing since sliced bread.  You immediately signed up for the newsletter, and for the first couple weeks you loved it! You’d check your email, notice the shiny new newsletter in your inbox and shriek like a little girl seeing Clay Aiken for the first time.

Fast forward 3 months later, and the novelty has worn off.  The cat pictures all look the same to you, and yet – you still get that newsletter in your inbox.  Instead of unsubscribing though, you delete it.

Why? Why do we continuously allow junk email into our lives we never read, and not opt-out of it?   In this article I’ll show why we do what we do, and my trick for simply and effectively breaking free of self inflicted junk email.

Writing Down Your Goals – The Harvard Written Goal Study. Fact or Fiction?

Various authors and speakers encourage writing down concrete goals, and use as evidence a study conducted on students in the 1979 Harvard MBA program. They point to the results of that study (where the 3 percent of written goal setters earned 10 times as much as the other 97 percent of the class combined) as proof and inspiration for students and readers.

The study has been quoted in seminars and books by Zig Ziglar, Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy and many other motivational and personal development speakers – but is the study true, or an urban legend? Find out in this feature report.