I was reading about the new Patti Smith autobiography, Just Kids, and was amazed at all the things this woman did in her life, not just the quantity of things, but even  more so the variety of things. For those of you who weren’t around when Patti Smith was popular in the media, she is most famous, certainly to me anyway, as a musician. Her album Horses is on many of the “100 top rock albums” lists. But, in addition, she was a painter, performance artist, an actress, and writer, even co-writing a play, Cowboy Mouth, with playwright Sam Shepard.

When I read about someone like this, I wonder about my quiet little life. Do you ever have similar feelings, sort of amazement at what some people accomplish in their lives, and more than a twinge of jealousy? If so, you are not alone.

It usually makes me wonder why I am not like that. My first wife was certainly like that. At 21, after earning her bachelors degree, she started a drug rehab program with a group of nuns. After she got her MPH (Masters of Public Health), she started a home day care program for out-of-work women (welfare moms). I was always amazed, watching her, experiencing her passion and creativity, and, once again, feeling more than a little jealous.

I was recently reading an article about persons who do extreme sports, BASE jumping (parachuting off bridges and skyscrapers), hang gliding, rock climbing. Such people, according to the study, frequently have deficiencies of dopamine. This deficiency means they need more excitement than a “normal” person just to feel alive. The author labels such people as Type T personalities.

But just because you don’t have a top rock album, or don’t BASE jump off of bridges, doesn’t mean you don’t have urgings, urgings to create something big, to do something special, to give your life more meaning.

You don’t need to have been born rebellious, like Patti Smith, and you don’t need to have an inadequate amount of endorphins like extreme athletes, to have a more meaningful, fuller life.

Living with passion doesn’t mean you have to do many different things. One is enough for most of us.

You just need to discover your passion.  Most of us just need to dig a little bit deeper to discover our passion. We have to work at it. Investigate. We need to force ourselves to try new things, to have new experiences. There is no need for us mere mortals to settle for “just getting by.”

Because once we discover our passion, something we love, our life gains so much more meaning. We are filled with energy.

But until we know what that purpose is, there is no way for us to fulfill it.

If you don’t know what it is, what passion you are here to pursue, why not make it your mission to find your passion. Try something you have always secretly (maybe even secretly to yourself) wanted to explore.

Some of your investigations will not pan out, like my adventure with sailing. Two hours into the class the instructor returned to the harbor to give my nausea a chance to subside.

But maybe one will result in you finding a life time passion like I did when I took a sculpting workshop. You can read all about it on my blog www.bobprentisssculpting.com.

Life is too short to not have passion in it. Why not get started today?

When I think about motivation the image in my head involves trains. I have always loved trains, perhaps because they remind me of my Dad. Every Christmas he would set up the Lionel trains, the big ones, with three rails, to circle around the Christmas tree and all over the living room. I’m sure it drove my Mom crazy, making her living room such a cluttered mess, but she was a good sport, since it only happened once a year.

In my image of motivation, I see a string of cars in a siding. There are box cars, tankers, refrigerator cars and flat cars. They are just sitting there, sitting there going nowhere. The goods inside the cars are stuck in the siding. Being stuck in the siding they aren’t doing anyone any good; they have no value so long as they stay in the siding.

Then the locomotive comes along, and backs into the siding. It hooks up to the cars, reverses its engines, and pulls those cars out of the siding. It pulls those cars into the city and into the markets in the city. Once the goods in the cars get into the market, they can be bought and sold; they have value.

This is the same thing that happens with motivation. The cars represent your dreams. As long as they are stuck in the sidings of your mind, they are without value; they are merely dreams, merely wishful thinking.

But hook those dreams up to motivation and bring them to the market place, and suddenly they have value. They become more than dreams, they become real!

Dreams can be wonderful in their own right; they can make life more fun, more tolerable. But how much better is a dream that is valuable, that is coming true.

Add motivation to your dreams, and make them real.

The third factor in the model for self motivation is environment. This means that your environment has a large impact on how motivated you are. Your environment can have a negative impact on your motivation or it can have a positive impact on it.

Though there are two different environments, our social and our physical environments, today I will focus on the former, the social environment, the people and organizations that surround us. Some of us are lucky and exist in a social environment that enhances our motivation. A healthy social environment would include, for example, parents who taught us good work habits, or who provided good models for cultivating social relationships. Others of us, however, are not so lucky.

If you are the result of such a healthy upbringing, you may not need to spend a lot of time learning how to make your social environment a positive impact on your environment. Lucky you.

If, however, you haven’t been blessed with a level of comfort or the skill to enter into beneficial relationships, you will need to work on gaining the skills necessary to do this.

There are two concerns that are triggered when a person is less than comfortable being social.

The first is that being uncomfortable with social interactions means you are less likely to gain the benefits that your social environment can provide. This includes contacts to increase your business and access to persons from whom you can learn necessary skills.

The second issue is the negative impact the feelings of being socially inept can have on you. People who see themselves as socially inept are likely to isolate themselves. Isolating yourself perpetuates your feelings of social ineptitude and guarantees that you will not learn the skills necessary to break free from those feelings and from the ineptitude.

So you don’t want to stay stuck in a place where you see yourself as socially inept.

Bob Newhart played a famous radio self help psychologist on Saturday Night Live. His advice, no matter what maladaptive behavior was expressed by the caller was, “Stop it.” It was delivered in the deadpan manner that Bob Newhart was so good at. We all laughed at the absurdity of the same exact advice being given regardless of the complaint, but it really isn’t such bad advice in this situation. Maybe it wouldn’t work for a phobic, but for most people who just consider themselves as shy, it definitely works.

It takes bravery to “just stop” being shy; not a lot, but certainly some. You start with a risk, a gentle risk. You take small steps. You join some type of club that mirrors a like or passion you have. Do you like to read? Join a book club. Do you enjoy using computers? Join a user group. Want to become a comfortable speaker? Join a Toastmasters Club.  I play the ukulele, so a ukulele club would be perfect for me.

Promise yourself you only need to observe. If someone initiates contact with you, then interact. But if no one does, which is probably unlikely, that’s all right. Spend the time watching how the other people interact. Make it an educational experience, learning from other people’s interactions.

As you get more comfortable, at the second or third meeting perhaps, initiate a contact with someone else, maybe a person who initiated contact with you at an earlier meeting. As you gain the experience, it gets easier and easier, or for some of us, less and less stressful.

Discomfort with social interactions is not going to just go away. But social interactions are too important to just let the discomfort control your life. You need to take control of it. You do it by taking risks, these baby steps.

I’m having motivation problems. I need to set up the email from this web site, bob@bobAPrentiss, so I can read it on my Mac, with my Mail application. That way it will come right to my computer and I won’t have to mess around with the CPanel of my web page.

This has been on my “to do” list for two months. For two months I have been putting it off. Why have I not done it yet? Because I am not motivated to do it. Why am I not motivated to do it? Because I don’t know how to do it. I started doing it, hit a snag, and went and did something else.

Now I’ve decided to ask a techie friend of mine to guide me though it – i’m going to utilize my social environment.

Maybe not knowing how to do something wouldn’t have adversely impacted your motivation. Maybe the need to learn a new skill would have been motivating to you.

But it sure makes mine suffer.

The point of this is that each one of us is different. That’s why a list of motivational hints may not be real helpful at motivating you. Those of us who create such lists design them for the average person. That’s why at best they do an average job of motivating you.

So what’s the alternative? It’s creating a motivational plan, designed just for you with your unique likes and dislikes, and with your unique motivators and demotivators.

The model for self motivation will help you design such a plan, just for you. It will take a little bit of work, up front, but will save you a lot of wasted energy as you work on making your dream, whatever it is, come true.

You can learn more about this powerful, self motivation tool by signing up for my newsletter just to the right of this blog entry.

I have written about this before, but it is so important I want to remind everyone.

If you are motivated, you will consistently take the steps you need to take to make your dreams come true. If you are not motivated, you will not be consistently taking the steps you need to take to make your dreams come true. And if you are not consistently taking the steps you need to take, your dreams will not come true.

This is why we need clarity if we are going to be motivated. We need to know exactly what we need to do to make our special dream come true.

If we just have a vague idea of what we want to accomplish, or we just know where we want to get but aren’t clear as to how to get there, we aren’t going to motivated. When we try to get to our goal in this state, we flounder, we get frustrated and we quit.

I’ll give an example. I have a YouTube channel. I have had some traffic but not as much as I want. So I’ve studied video marketing, reading about it on the web and attending a bunch of webinars. I now understand it’s not enough to make and post our videos; we have to promote them as well.

So for the last four weeks I’ve been promising myself to promote my videos. But it hadn’t occurred. “Promoting my videos” was too vague an assignment; it didn’t tell me exactly what I was to do. It doesn’t tell me the tasks I need to do to. It’s a goal, which is great, but in order to be motivating, it needs to be broken down into the tasks that will make the goal happen.

So this week my assignment was no longer “promote my videos.” It was “make a list of the tasks I need to do to promote my videos.”

So first thing Saturday morning I sat down, went through my white papers and my reports and notes of webinars I have attended and compiled a list of all the things I want to do to promote my videos. The first things on my list were finding the most popular but less competitive keywords and phrases, putting my website’s URL into the description, and figuring out how to use channels and playlists.

I’m not going to do all the activities this week. In fact, promoting my videos is a continuing process. But I’ve made a great start, and am now motivated to achieve this goal.

What goal have you been promising yourself to complete, but haven’t? Try breaking it down into its parts, the tasks and activities you need to do to make the goal happen. And please share your experience with this strategy with your fellow readers by leaving a comment below.