105about self-motivation, would you ask me how to keep it
going in your life? The person in this room best equipped
to answer your question is you. So I’ll ask you, “How
will you keep this going in your life?” I bet you could
give me 10 ways you could do it. And I bet that if this
were a foreign language you had to learn you would set
aside a certain amount of time each day to review it, to
read it out loud, and to make certain you learned it. I
bet you’d buy tapes or CDs for your car and even ar-
range small study groups. So the real question is this:
Is mastering the art of motivation as important as learn-
ing another language?
Even a single phrase, placed prominently in a home
or office, can have a huge impact on your life. In Arnold
Schwarzenegger’s childhood home in a poor town in Aus-
tria, his father framed and hung the simple words, “Joy
Through Strength.” It’s not hard to see what effect that
idea had on Arnold’s life.
Once while I was attending a Werner Erhard semi-
nar, I had some free time during a break so I wrote my-
self a letter. I put down all the ideas I wanted to re-
member from the seminar and I sealed them in an enve-
lope. I took it home and a month later I mailed it to
myself. When I opened it at work and read it, it was
like a fresh experience all over again.
I was so impressed by how effective this was for me
that I employed the idea in one of my own seminars. I
had everyone in the audience write out the important
insights they’d received and what they intended to do
differently in their lives from this moment on. When
the people were finished, I asked them to seal the let-
ters into the envelopes I’d provided and address the
envelopes to themselves. I told them I would hold them
for a month and then mail them all.
Remind your mind