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By CreatorsCreate On April 2, 2008
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When you are motivated you approach your tasks with enthusiasm. What is enthusiasm? The Greek meaning of the word means to be inspired by a god.
en – in, or possessed
theos – god
en+theos = inspired, possessed by a god
Can you imagine if you were always doing things that were inspired by a god? Think you’d ever want to do things any other way?
Take the converse: A lack of enthusiasm can make everything seem like hard work. You will feel like your driving force has gone and you just can’t be bothered to do what you need to; so you procrastinate.
Sometimes you don’t want to do anything at all when you lack enthusiasm. This feeling can hold you back and stop you achieving your best, which in turn lowers your enthusiasm even further.
Excuses are Like Noses
With a lack of enthusiasm it’s easy to come up with excuses for not getting done with what you need to do. But this just increases the problem as you dig yourself deeper into a pit of lethargy.
Why do you suffer from a lack of enthusiasm? It may be that you lack confidence so you don’t feel that you will do well at something.
It is far easier to explain it away to yourself with the excuse that you didn’t try because had you tried you might have failed. A lack off effort is way easier to bear in oneself than a lack of ability or possibility of failure.
Ability to Make It Happen
Perhaps it is not ability you lack, or feel you lack; perhaps you don’t have enough interest in the project at hand to really put your full effort into it.
Maybe you don’t perceive the task ahead as very important; many of us would lack enthusiasm to do something which we considered to be pointless or at least that there are far more important things to do.
If there is no incentive for you to do something, then very often you will lack enthusiasm to do it. That could be as simply solved as you needing to look a little deeper into the project to understand it better.
Beyond Lazy
Many people are just plain lazy. More likely, though, procrastination and putting things off has just become a habit for you; reinforced each time you do it – so it gets easier each time.
If you are scared about what people might say about your efforts you may lack enthusiasm to complete a task and have it open to scrutiny. If you are stressed or nervous about tackling something, that saps your enthusiasm to begin it.
Search Within
All of these reasons can lead to a lack of motivation and enthusiasm, but it is important to recognize that they are only excuses which you make to yourself to stop yourself from action.
You can learn to overcome any of these reasons for a lack of enthusiasm if you recognize them within yourself; like with all problems, you need to recognize them before you can change them. Only then can you learn to think differently and re-discover your enthusiasm.
Decide to be Enthusiastic
It is much easier to become enthusiastic and motivated again if you are able to decide what is important to you in your life. This can be little things that you enjoy doing every day or it can be long-term plans you have.
If something is important to you, it is much easier to maintain the enthusiasm needed to complete the task.
It may be that you are motivated by extrinsic rewards or by intrinsic satisfaction; you will need to think about what works for you, so that you are receiving some pleasure feel inspired and get things done. That is where your enthusiasm lies – in the inspiration from a god.
By CreatorsCreate On February 10, 2008
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Creators dream and most of them dream big, really big. In fact creators aren’t afraid to dream enormous dreams. They know that dreams are the seeds of what will eventually become their creations.
One thing though that creators don’t do is set goals. Now before you go off thinking that I am a complete fool in saying this, please give me a chance to explain myself.
You have no doubt searched many self development products throughout the years, and probably would agree that almost every single one of them in one way or another talks about goal setting. Am I right? Many of those self development products are tremendously powerful self development tools. I’m not writing this to disagree with goal setting. There are many great things to be said about goal setting.
Recently I read an article in the Early to Rise newsletter written by Michael Masterson which spoke of setting goals. It spoke of a study that was done by the Harvard Business School.
Harvard Business School did a study on the financial status of its students 10 years after graduation and found that:
- As many as 27 percent of them needed financial assistance.
- A whopping 60 percent of them were living paycheck to paycheck.
- A mere 10 percent of them were living comfortably.
- And only 3 percent of them were financially independent.
The study also looked at goal setting and found these interesting correlations:
- The 27 percent that needed financial assistance had absolutely no goal-setting processes in their lives.
- The 60 percent that were living paycheck to paycheck had basic survival goals (such as managing to live paycheck to paycheck).
- The 10 percent that were living comfortably had general goals. They thought they knew where they were going to be in the next five years.
- The 3 percent that were financially independent had written out their goals and the steps required to reach those goals.
Pretty powerful statistics in favor of goal setting wouldn’t you agree? Like I said I am not writing this article to disagree with goal setting. It’s just that for creators goals are too weak, too wimpy. Goals give too much wiggle room. Goals don’t carry enough umph to propel a true creator to the completion of their creation.
Creators create – plain and simple. It works like this: A creator dreams of what he would love to create, and then something almost magical occurs. The creator begins to love the creation. There begins to be a burning desire inside the creator to see the creation live. The creator will stop at nothing to bring the creation into existence. The creator begins to create. As the momentum increases the creators desire to see the creation exist increases as well. Passion, diligence, even obsession begin to drive the creator forward.
So you see goals are simply too weak to push the creator towards the creation. So what do creators do if they don’t set goals? How do creators ever accomplish anything of any significance if they don’t have goals to push them along?
I hope that I can explain the answers to those very important questions. Creators don’t have goals to push them along; instead creators have the creation that is pulling them towards its completion.
It’s kind of like this: Imagine a mountain climber trying to scale the side of a mountain. Below the climber is a goal that is trying to push the climber up the rock wall. Above however is a creation that has lowered a sturdy rope called structure (in later article I’ll describe what structure has to do with creating) that is pulling with great force. Which do you think will have more success in fulfilling its purpose, the goal or the creation? Which do you think is in a better position to bring the climber to its desired destiny?
As I hope you can see, goals simply aren’t powerful enough. And they are positioned in such a way that they cannot make use of powerful tools like passion, diligence, and even obsession. Creators create creations because they are driven towards and pulled by the creation itself.
The power to create is immensely more powerful then goals can or ever will be. In a further article I will explain why this is so. Come back soon to learn just how powerful this power is.
By Michael Claridge On February 6, 2008
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Creators create because they love.
Let me explain: Have you ever been in love? I mean, have you ever been truly in love with someone else?
When you love someone with great passion you don’t want to let them alone. You don’t want to be away from them or leave them for long periods of time. No, in fact, quite the contrary, you can’t stand to be away from that person. You do whatever you can to spend your time with that person.
You watch what you say, what you do, and how you behave. You do nice things, you are careful because you don’t want that person to get upset with you or to be offended by anything you say or do. You do only what is necessary to have the romance blossom and grow. Things that would cause the relationship to be cold or distant you avoid at all costs.
The very same thing happens between a creator and a creation. A creator desires to bring the creation into existence. The creator loves the creation.
There have been other words used to describe this like, buy in, or empowerment, or take responsibility for, or accountable for, but I like to use the word love the best.
When the relationship is like being in love a creator treats the creation with careful preciseness. The creation lives because the creator loves it.
I do not think a creator can create a creation that he does not love, or at best the creation will not reach its potential. That is where procrastination comes into play. But when there is a passionate love for the creation the creator will at all costs create the creation.
A creation that is passionately loved by its creator is never left alone. It is constantly on the mind of the creator. Creators rise early to work on the creation and retire late, if at all.
In a recent article written by Robert Ringer he wrote about John Britten, I think he said it best:
“John Britten, was born with a serious learning disability that made reading extremely difficult. Not able to learn in conventional schools, Britten attended night school and eventually earned an engineering degree from Christchurch Polytechnic Institute of Technology. His determination to earn a degree — and, more important, gain precious knowledge — was a sign of things to come.
Britten was a quiet, unassuming, totally focused individual. Some years before I met him, he began building, of all things, a futuristic motorcycle in his garage. His stated goal was to win the prestigious Battle of the Twins international cycle race in Daytona Beach, Florida.
His cutting-edge cycle involved over 6,000 parts, most of which Britten hand-made. With the notable exception of the engine, his extraordinary machine was constructed primarily of carbon fiber, a first for the motorcycle industry.
He had dedicated helpers who worked for free, mostly at night, while holding down full-time jobs during the day. Incredibly, the actual cost of Britten’s masterpiece was not more than a few hundred dollars, while many large corporate sponsors spent several million dollars on their entries.
Working while others slept was a Britten norm that was accepted by those who agreed to become involved in his projects. Toiling around the clock became his trademark. Anything short of a superhuman pace would have made it impossible for him to build his one-of-a-kind cycle from scratch in just under eleven months, barely finishing in time for the Battle of the Twins.
With just three weeks to go before the big race, Britten’s carbon-fiber cycle crashed while being tested. It was a cruel blow, a bad break that everyone agreed Britten didn’t deserve. The task of locating and correcting the problem, then repairing the bike, seemed insurmountable — but Britten and his crew again managed to overcome all obstacles, and arrived in Daytona just in time.
Then, during the qualifying run, disaster again struck. Just twelve hours before race time, a hairline crack in a cylinder sleeve — one of the few parts Britten had not built himself — threatened to end his bid for the unofficial world championship for twin-cylinder motorcycles. Britten’s reaction? After tireless but fruitless efforts to find the right spare part in the Daytona area, Britten, who had no previous experience in welding cylinder sleeves, repaired the broken part himself.
By race time, Britten had been awake forty-seven hours straight. But, as events unfolded, it looked as though the monumental effort by him and his team would finally pay off. Once again, however, like a scene out of a depressing movie, bad luck reared its ugly head. With Britten’s cycle leading the pack, rain forced an end to the race one lap from the finish, which meant the entire race had to be run over.
In the restarted race, Britten’s cycle again led the pack most of the way, until — you guessed it — yet another non-Britten-built part, a faulty rectifier, halted his bid for victory once and for all. John Britten had captured the admiration of the racing world, but had failed to come home with a trophy.
But when he returned to New Zealand, he didn’t waste time focusing on the bad breaks he had experienced in Daytona. Instead, he went right back to work, rebuilt his handcrafted motorcycle, and returned to Daytona the next year. This time, he finally won the Battle of the Twins championship, a Rocky Balboa finish if there ever was one.
The victory doesn’t end there. The first commercial version of the Britten motorcycle sold for a record $140,000. Not a bad return on the few hundred dollars he had spent on the design and construction of the original model. “
You see, John Britten loved his creation. He was willing to fight through whatever, doing whatever it took in order for his creation to live, to exist.
True creators passionately love their creations. And understand this also, just as a lover will not do anything to offend his partner so too a creator will only do what is necessary to bring the creation into existence.
Too many people don’t understand that principle. Too many think that creation is about how one can use creative techniques and principles. They expand their imagination by “creative” problem solving, or thinking outside the box, or idea generating, or mind-mapping, or other solutions to creatively “freeing the mind” and creatively “breaking through” barriers and obstacles that stand in the way.
Even though many of these principles and schools of thought can be involved in creating they are not necessary to create. It is not about creative problem solving or how to increase your imagination to generate a myriad of never before thought of creative alternatives. It’s about loving your creation.
Why, you will come to see that those very approaches leave out the most important and ultimately essential question of the entire creative process: “What is it that I desire to create?” or even better, “What do I love so much I want to bring into existence?”
The originality, the artistic, the fanciful and inventiveness that spring from the creative process is not brought about by coming up with new ideas that are “outside the box”. Nor does creativity come about by generating many new unheard of alternatives or generating new paths to solve old problems. In fact, it is something quite different.
Through these past years I have had occasion to sit in psychologist’s offices and hear the doctors say, “Michael does things that are so original and unusual, he is so creative. If we could only encourage it, bottle it up and give it to all our patients, then all our patients would be more original and creative.”
I hope to teach you that the path to get to the creation is important, but the creative person isn’t so much worried about the path, but more intently focused on the end result: the creation. True creators don’t worry so much about the process but more about the results.
True creators love the creation so much they want to bring it into existence. I know I keep saying that, because it is absolutely true.
Here is an example I hope will make it more clear: What if Michelangelo worried more about the process and took this approach while painting the famous painting of “The Creation of Adam” can you imagine the result?
“Hmm, let’s see.” He says, “How many different ways can I paint Adam’s hand? Let me try doing it with watercolor, now charcoal, now lets try different sizes, a baby’s hand, now a grown man’s. Now let me try it on different canvases, paper, parchment, a stone wall, a ceiling?” If he had taken that approach he might have never finished the painting, and if he had finished, it would have been a hodgepodge of different alternatives.
Truly modern art, but far from the masterpiece he actually did create. Far from the creation that he obviously poured his whole heart and soul into, the creation that he no doubt loved.
Creative people who really know the creative process might over many years of experiments and experiences use many different methods and techniques to learn and grow in their varied disciplines. That’s called practicing their craft.
But when it comes to creating the creator asks the most important question that can be asked, “What would I love to create?” And then with an economy of means employs only those techniques and methods that will bring the creation into existence as effectively and efficiently as possible.
Each of us, individually, have the power to be creators. Even those of you who think you are not creative. I am going to prove to you that you do in truth have the power to create. You have the power to create anything you desire to create.
It’s not about being artistic or painting paintings, or making sculptures, or singing or dancing; it’s about creating. It’s about loving. If you can love, you can create.
By Michael Claridge On January 30, 2008
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Do you have fear of failure?
Enough already with all your fears. You’ve got them, I know you do. So did I. I was afraid of failure. I didn’t ever dare start anything because I would most certainly fail at it.
If I never started then I’d never fail was the way my insane brain would think about it. Little did I know that not moving forward was actually making me move in reverse. Instead of getting closer to the things I wanted in my life I was getting further away with each passing minute.
You want to know what helped me to make a change? I thought about all the many successful people, creators, who had succeeded at creating great lives in spite of their failures.
Here’s a list:
- Einstein was 4 years old before he could speak.
- Isaac Newton did poorly in grade school and was considered “unpromising.”
- When Thomas Edison was a youngster, his teacher told him he was too stupid to learn anything. He was counseled to go into a field where he might succeed by virtue of his pleasant personality.
- F.W. Woolworth got a job in a dry goods store when he was 21, but his boss would not permit him to wait on customers because he “didn’t have enough sense to close a sale.”
- Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team.
- Bob Cousy suffered the same fate, but he too is a Hall of Famer.
- A newspaper editor fired Walt Disney because he “lacked imagination and had no original ideas.”
- Winston Churchill failed the 6th grade and had to repeat it because he did not complete the tests that were required for promotion.
- Babe Ruth struck out 1,300 times, a major league record.
A person may make mistakes, but is not a failure until he starts letting his failures define him as a failure. We must believe in ourselves, and never give up.
Somewhere along the road of life we will meet someone who sees greatness in us and lets us know it. But even if we don’t meet that some one till many years later we still cannot afford to let ourselves be afraid of trying.
Don’t give up. Stick in there until you know for sure you are a success. Let your failures make you stronger. Learn from them so that they don’t define you – you define them.
By Michael Claridge On January 27, 2008
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Ever wonder why some people cacn’t even achieve an inch of what they dream of becoming? Blame it on pure dreaming. I know, that’s what I’ve done for the greater part of twenty years. I have had a lack of setting goals; making plans for achieving my dreams.
Setting goals is a very significant part of success and creating creations. It’s deciding before you set out to create exactly what you want to create in the first place.
People who set goals literally create a map of their target achievements in life, marking where they should begin, where to pause, where to delve a bit deeper, and where and when to stop. Once this map is created, it allows the map drawer to check where he is in the scheme of things and whether or not he is making some achievements that will take him closer to his goals, or whether or not he is heading in the correct direction.
By setting goals, creators know how they are doing and what they should be doing to achieve their targets or dreams in life. They know if they can relax or if they have to double their efforts when they are falling short of what is expected of them.
Goal setting means a person is proactive in dealing with challenges that may affect his creation. Being proactive means one is able to outline possible difficulties that may occur as well as the solutions to those difficulties. By doing this, a person is not easily scared or defeated when challenges occur because he has already prepared for them. He knows they can happen and he has prepared a solution or strategy when that time comes.
Setting goals will enable creators to track their progress in whatever creation they have set out to create. Goals help them become more confident in themselves and more motivated to achieve their plans. Creators don’t procrastinate – they are too passionate about, and desire too much to see their creation exist. Procrastination is a thing of the past.
However, goal setting is not enough, as this should be accompanied by love, faith, and self-discipline. A creator may have a blueprint of what he desires to create, but if he does not have these necessary tools to carry out the plan, then most likely nothing will come out of it.
When a creator loves the idea of what will be created, the creator works voraciously to bring it into existence. Coupled with faith that the thing to be created can and will be created and self-discipline to make it happen. The creation has every chance of coming into existence – living.
To be successful in goal setting, the goals that creators set should be realistic and based on true principles. Being too ambitious in setting up goals can make the goals unrealistic and difficult to achieve. However, creators do not also set goals that are too low because this might discourage their vision instead of achieving it.
It is also necessary that the creator setting the blueprint for his creation should also include a time frame within which the goal will be achieved. This way, he is able to determine if he has to fast track his strategies or to slow down a bit. Goal setting will also help a creator check if he is performing within his plans or if he is doing things towards the achievement of his plans.
Once you have created something, even a little of what you hoped to create, then you should always give yourself a pat in the back to keep you motivated. But do not be too complacent with any little achievement, as this may cause you to backslide.
Setting goals can be used in any aspect of one’s life – from one’s personal or family life, to his career and finances. Goal setting can be as simple as setting a target weight when you wish to lose pounds or something big, like earning your first million.
When setting goals, it is always important to set standards that would suit your present situation, your capabilities, and other factors that may influence the achievement of your goal.
Get out a piece of paper.
Write out what you want to create.
Get Creating!
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To your creations,
Michael Claridge
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