51Pro football Hall of Famer Fran Tarkenton recom-
mends looking at any task you do as fun.
“If it’s not fun,” he says, “you’re not doing it right.”
People who get high on marijuana often find they
can laugh at anything. The problem with them is that
they think this kind of “fun” is inherent in the mari-
juana. It’s not. The capacity for fun was already there
inside of them. The marijuana just artificially opened
them up to it. But the physical and psychological price
paid for such a drugged opening is not worth the high.
(I wish I didn’t know this first hand, but I do.) The price
drug users pay is this: Their self-esteem suffers because
they didn’t create the fun they had—they thought the
drugs did it for them. So they keep shrinking, the more
they use, into greater paranoia and self-disgust. Soon
they’re using the drug just to feel normal.
William Burroughs, a former drug addict and au-
thor of Naked Lunch, discovered something that was
very interesting and bitterly amusing to him after fi-
nally recovering from his addictions.
“There isn’t any feeling you can get on drugs,” he
said “that you can’t get without drugs.”
Make a commitment to yourself to find the natural
highs you need to stay motivated. Start by finding out
what it does to your mood and energy to laugh, to sing,
to dance, to walk, to run, to hug someone, or to get some-
thing done.
Then support your experiments by telling yourself
that you’re not interested in doing anythingthat isn’t
fun. If you can’t immediately see the fun in something,
find a way to create it. Once you have made a task fun,
you have solved the problem of self-motivation.
Use your brain chemicals