159But once I start, something always happens to alter
my feelings about the run. By the end of the run, I no-
tice that it had somehow become thoroughly enjoyable.
In my self-motivation seminars, I often give a home-
work assignment for people to write down what their
main goals are for the next year. I ask them to fill no
more than a half-page. This is not a difficult assignment
for people who are willing to just come off the top of
their heads and have fun filling the page. But you would
be surprised at how many people absolutely anguish
over it, trying to get it “right,” as if they were going to
be held forever to what they write down. Many people
simply can’t do it.
To get them to complete the exercise, I say, “put any-
thing down. Make something up. It doesn’t even have to
be true. They don’t even have to be your goals, just do it
so you can understand the exercise we’re about to do.”
The point is to just do it.
In many ways we are all novelists like Anne Lamott.
Our novels are our lives. And many of us get a tragic
form of writer’s block that causes us to not write any-
thing at all. It’s a tragedy, because deep down we are
very creative. We could write a great life. It’s just that
we’re so afraid of writing badly, that we never write.
Don’t let this happen to you. If you’re not motivated
to do something you know you need to do, just decide to
do it badly. Add a little self-deprecating humor. Be comi-
cally bad at what you’re doing. And then enjoy what
happens to you once you’re into the process.
75. Learn visioneering
A few years ago I spent some enjoyable time work-
ing with motivational speaker Dennis Deaton and teach-
ing his principles of “visioneering”—which he defines
Learn visioneering