100 Ways To Motivate Yourself, Third Edition

51. Advertise to yourself

I often start the day by drawing four circles on a blank piece of paper.

The circles represent my day (today), my month, my year, and my life. Inside each circle I write down what I want. It can be a dollar figure, it can be anything, and the goals can change from day to day—it doesn’t matter. There is no way to get this process wrong.

But by writing the goals down, I am like an airline pilot who is consulting a map prior to takeoff. I am orienting my mind to what I am up to in life. I am reminding myself of what I really want. We wouldn’t think, before an airline flight, of poking our heads into the cabin and saying to the pilot, “Just take me anywhere!” Yet, that’s how we live our days when we don’t check the map. ...