Daily Motivator - May

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May 16

Face the problem

Facing a serious problem is tough. Yet the long-term consequences of avoiding that problem will be even more difficult.

There is no easy choice, but it’s easy to see there is an optimal choice. Facing the problem, as burdensome as it may be, is less burdensome than forever running from it.

Wishing that the problem had never happened, doesn’t improve anything. Pretending the problem isn’t there does not make it go away.

You have a strong, innate desire to follow the least objectionable path. Put that desire to work for you.

Remind yourself that the pain of avoidance will be far greater than the pain of facing the problem. Then let your own natural desire to avoid the bigger pain, push you to embrace the lesser pain of taking action.

Make a difficult path easier to choose by comparing it to an even more difficult option. Face the problem once and for all, long before it can become much worse.

— Ralph Marston

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May 17

Valuable experience

Look back on yesterday, or last week, or the past six months, and ask yourself this. What could you have done differently to improve your outcomes?

Could you have been more ambitious, more open to opportunities? Could you have been more patient and understanding, more authentic, more generous with your time and attention?

Whether the results you’ve been getting are spectacular or not so great, there are specific ways to improve on them. And you know, more than anyone else, what they are.

Perhaps you could have spent more time on certain efforts and less time on other activities. Maybe you could have been more receptive to the advice of certain people and less influenced by pressure from other people.

You know what helped you and what hurt you, what energized you and what held you back. If you were doing it all over again, in what specific ways would you do it better?

Ask yourself that question, and then let your answer inform and improve your choices going forward. Consider what you would have done differently, and make positive use of all the valuable experience you’ve earned.

— Ralph Marston

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May 18

Value of your effort

Don’t let yourself become discouraged when your efforts fail to produce the desired results. Instead, be thankful for the experience, however it turned out, and make good use of it.

Consider a professional athlete who trains every day for years before entering any competition. Those practice sessions don’t produce immediate wins, yet they are essential to eventually winning.

Certainly you don’t ever want to think that your efforts have been wasted. So, do what you must do, going forward, to make sure that they’re not wasted.

At the very least, you’ve had an excellent lesson in what doesn’t work. That’s valuable experience, useful to you and to others.

Though it can understandably feel like you’ve lost everything, that isn’t the case. You will always have the experience, the wisdom, the skills, and those are not trivial.

For all sorts of reasons, sometimes things don’t work out, but that doesn’t negate the value of your effort. Look back, see that value, then find an even better way to carry it forward.

— Ralph Marston

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May 19

New understanding

You don’t gain understanding just because you desire it. Understanding requires mental effort, humility, time, patience, commitment.

Understanding is costly, and it is worth the cost. Understanding opens up valuable options to you.

When you understand another person’s perspective, you can cooperate with that person to mutual benefit. Understand a concept, a process, the context of a situation, and you can leverage that understanding to produce great value.

Understanding is necessarily built on what you already know. Yet to achieve true understanding, you must accept that your current understanding could be partially or entirely ill-informed.

Engage your curiosity, and then follow where it leads. Shed your assumptions, let go of your need to prove anything, and allow understanding to grow out of the truth you experience.

Seek to understand, work to understand, and humble yourself before the reality of what you learn. Every new understanding enriches what you already understand, and opens the door to understand even more.

— Ralph Marston

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May 20

Loan yourself some energy

If you don’t have much energy, start to use whatever energy you do have. You’re sure to get more.

When you can’t muster the enthusiasm to take action, go ahead and take action anyway. The enthusiasm will come.

Whatever you must do, you don’t have to wait to feel like it. Because very quickly, what you do will change the way you feel.

Loan yourself some enthusiasm, some energy, some hopefulness, some ambition. You’ll soon be paying yourself back, with interest.

Rise up, literally, physically, stand straight, look forward. Change the quality of your experience and you’ll immediately change the state of your attitude, of your spirit.

You can feel the way you choose to feel, the way you choose to act. So choose to feel vigorous, energetic, and purposeful by acting that way, and give life all the good things you can give it.

— Ralph Marston

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May 21

Beyond trying

To get something done, you have to stop merely trying to do it. If you see yourself as trying, you’re reinforcing doubts about your ability.

When you’re merely trying, you’re not fully committed. Maybe you’re not even sure what you want, or whether you truly want it.

Ask yourself, what would it take to get beyond trying? What can you pursue that will leave you with no doubts about its worthiness, no doubts about your ability to make it happen?

You can adjust your goal, you can modify your strategy, you can let go of certain priorities and embrace others. You can get yourself to the place where you’re far beyond trying, and actually making progress.

Trying wears you down, and you deserve better. You deserve to be fully engaged in rich, meaningful effort that’s leading to a valued outcome.

Get beyond trying, beyond doubt, frustration, and empty efforts. Experience the clarity, the honesty, the sheer joy of making good and meaningful things happen.

— Ralph Marston

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May 22

Life’s unfairness

It is unfair that one person is skilled at making bread while another is skilled at growing vegetables. Yet from that unfairness can come a very tasty meal.

It is unfair that some people have more wealth than other people. However, out of that unfairness arise ambition, innovation, new value, and ongoing progress.

Some unfairness is intentionally and malevolently maintained. Much of it, though, is a necessary consequence of the fact that every person is unique.

Just because life is unfair, that’s no reason to reject its abundant, diverse possibilities. Just because many of life’s underpinnings are unfair, is no reason to tear them all down.

You don’t ever have to see life’s unfairness as an excuse to hide behind. You can choose instead to see it as a challenge to rise above.

Rather than letting unfairness get you down, let the richness of life’s possibilities push you upward. And fulfill the unique potential, live the special value, that is yours to experience.

— Ralph Marston

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May 23

Today’s joys

Later is too late. Live today’s joys today.

Honor your commitments, do your work. But don’t let it become an excuse to put off the joys you can create and experience right now.

Joy refreshes you, inspires you, energizes you. And there’s a lot of good you can do with that energy.

Joy connects you with purpose, with love, with all you value. Joy reminds you why you do what you do, why you seek what you seek.

Joy is yours to choose here, now. Joy asks only that you allow it, express it, share it, and when you do, the moment is filled with its energy.

Offer the value of joy to those you’re with, to where you are, to what you’re doing. Live today’s joys, for the only time to do so is now.

— Ralph Marston


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May 24

Active participation

Grab your life today and inject some meaningful intention into it. Then act on that intention.

If you have no intention to do anything useful, you won’t get anything useful done. Give yourself a clear objective for this day, and imbue its moments with meaningful experience.

Enjoy the feeling of knowing you’re doing what you set out to do. Be inspired by the satisfaction of making real progress.

Within a few hours, the opportunities of this day will be gone, forever irretrievable. Decide, early on, precisely how you will make use of those opportunities before they vanish.

Then forge ahead with purposeful activity. With your efforts, harvest today’s opportunities and transform them into lasting value.

Don’t waste this precious day of your life wondering, worrying, complaining, or speculating. Decide what you will do, then do it, and give life new richness as the result of your active participation.

— Ralph Marston

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May 25

Live with optimism

You can offer hope when others trade in nothing but despair. You can live with optimism when others are mired in pessimism.

Lots of people gain short-term profit by constantly spreading doom and gloom. But that doesn’t mean they’re particularly insightful.

If you expect life to get better you’ll be seen as naive. Yet if history is any indication, you’ll also be right.

Yes, very awful things happen from time to time. But on each and every occasion, the vast majority of people find their way beyond the difficulties, and end up even better off than before.

Life constantly produces great challenges. Yet life also offers great meaning and fulfillment in overcoming those challenges, and most people are happy to embrace that offer.

At this moment, billions of unique, creative, resourceful people are working, each in their own way, to make life better. There’s an exceedingly good chance they’ll succeed.

— Ralph Marston

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May 26

Choose your courage

You’re not sure what will happen today, or tomorrow. Even so, you can step forward and live with courage.

You can make the best plans and preparations, and work with persistent effort. Yet you know there are rarely any guarantees.

Challenges are great, risks are many, and uncertainties abound. Nonetheless, you can move ahead with courage.

Courage is not a matter of being certain about what will happen. Courage is not the absence of fear.

Courage is knowing that you can enact a positive response to whatever happens. Courage is being realistic about your prospects, listening to your fears, and taking well-informed action.

Courage is already within you, and always yours to choose. Feel your purpose, choose your courage, and transform the challenges into achievements.

— Ralph Marston

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May 27

Meaningful positive difference

Set a small goal, and achieve it. Then immediately set another small goal, and achieve that.

Occasionally you’ll have the opportunity to make big, sudden improvements. Yet always, in every moment, you are able to make small improvements.

There’s great power in doing so. Because those small improvements add to each other, and build on one another.

The long and inexorable march of progress is not, by and large, a history of quick advances. It is a story of small improvements, and improvements on the improvements, made again and again.

Today you can continue that beneficial story. Right now, several small improvements await your attention, your action.

You don’t have to wait one more moment for the chance to make a meaningful positive difference. Where you are, with what you have, make a small improvement, and set the process in motion.

— Ralph Marston

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May 28

Steady diet of challenge

If your skills are not being challenged, they are not being maintained. Just as muscles atrophy from non-use, so do your abilities recede when they are not regularly exercised.

You’ve put much effort into developing those abilities. Make sure they remain strong, vibrant, and relevant by challenging yourself to put them to good use.

It’s tempting to coast for a while, and live with minimal effort off the success you’ve already achieved. Yet the day will come when you’ll need your full strength, and you’ll encounter great regret if you let that strength grow soft.

At some point you’re sure to meet up with a challenge you cannot avoid. The more experience you have at handling challenges, the better your outcome will be.

Plus, a steady diet of challenge keeps your life interesting and your purpose clear. And when you proactively choose your troubles, you distance yourself from those more troubling troubles that might otherwise choose you.

Provide yourself with a continuing supply of meaningful challenges to embrace. Stay strong while making a positive difference in your own life and in the lives of others.

— Ralph Marston

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May 29

Tangible results

Don’t merely collect knowledge and skills. Put them to practical use.

Don’t just spend all your time and energy amassing a large set of tools. Do meaningful, beneficial work with those tools.

It’s great to have skills, capabilities, resources, and connections. But it would be a terrible shame not to deploy them in the service of a worthwhile goal.

Yes, prepare yourself well, align yourself to achieve. Then follow through with the achievement.

Admit to yourself, and to the world, what you care about, what matters to you. Put your love and caring into action, and transform it all into tangible results.

Utilize the potential of all your other skills with the skill of being purposeful. Discover what a great difference you can make, and make it.

— Ralph Marston

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May 30

Do more

Do more of what gets you to think. Do more of what motivates you to act.

Do less of what leaves you sluggish. Do less of what wastes your time.

Find people and places that inspire you to imagine. Seek circumstances that fill you with energy and enthusiasm.

Life’s richness is here and now, ready for you to live it in your own unique way. Let the possibilities fill you with excitement, and push you into action.

Do more of what you know is right, and good, helpful, truthful, and fulfilling. Do more of the things that make you thrilled to wake up every morning.

No matter what you’ve done, or what you’ve neglected, now things are different. This is your chance to do more.

— Ralph Marston

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May 31

Time of transformation

The current moment is special, different in an important way from every other moment. The current moment, right now, is a time of transformation.

You may have been frustrated for hours, or weeks. Yet right now, you can choose to get past that frustration, to take a more positive approach.

Perhaps for the last few days you’ve been a little sluggish and unmotivated. You can transform, right now, into being energetic and productive.

What’s so great about right now is this. The negative choices, feelings, and attitude can stop, and the positive elements of your life can expand.

Right now, you can make a clean break from the past. You can leave behind what has not worked, and double down on what does work well for you.

As difficult, limiting, disappointing as the past may have been, now it’s over. Now, in this time of transformation, is your great chance to do a whole lot better.

— Ralph Marston