155Bryant. “It’ll be a war out there,” he said with a twinkle
in his eye.
We don’t have to wait for something tragic or dan-
gerous to attack us from the outside. We can get the
same vitality going by challenging ourselves from within.
A useful exercise for self-motivation is to ask your-
self what you’d do if you had Anthony Burgess’s origi-
nal predicament. “If I had just a year to live, how would
I live differently? What exactly would I do?”
73. Use the 5% solution
Many years ago, when I first began considering the
idea of changing my life, I went through some emotional
mood swings. I would get very high on an idea of who I
could be, and I’d set out to change myself overnight. Then
my old habits would pull me back to who I used to be,
and I would become demoralized and depressed for
weeks, thinking I didn’t have what it took to change. As
the weeks went by, I finally caught on to the idea that
great things are often created very slowly, so why
couldn’t great people be created the same way? I began
to see the value in small changes, here and there, that
led me in the direction of who I wanted to be.
If I wanted to be someone who was healthy and had
good eating habits, I would introduce a salad here, a piece
of fruit there, and take the creative process very slowly.
Now I almost never eat red meat, but it didn’t happen by
simply ruling it out one night. (All the times I tried that,
my stomach, which used to far outrank my mind in my
internal chain of command, would rule it back in the first
time I smelled a barbecue in the neighborhood.)
Pyschotherapist Dr. Nathaniel Branden is known for
the effectiveness in his therapy of using sentence
Use the 5% solution