Why on earth would anybody willingly want to live so…dully? It’d be easy for me to throw up my hands and say “Who knows?” – but in reality, there are a lot of reasons people want to live their lives as an unspectacular chain of events.

The funny thing is that all of these dull people constantly try to convince everybody else to be dull just like them. All of the time. For some reason, people adore attempting to talk others into living life just as they are. Since most of the people doing these attempts at converting are naturally dull, it takes on an odd twist: Living life to your absolute fullest is encouraged when you’re little, then discouraged once you hit adulthood. Dull-ness needs to rule once you can think for yourself!

But… who wouldn’t want to be the exception to the rule? Who doesn’t want a fabulous life that’s different from everybody else, from the time you’re little to when you’re older than dirt?

You can’t do that! That’s the exception!

When you’re a little kid, you’re often encouraged by nearly everybody around you to think big and dream even bigger. Whatever you want to achieve in life, you can certainly do it. You just have to believe you can, set a goal that you’re going to obtain what you want, and get working. Not even the sky is  your limit unless you limit yourself.

But along the way, as you grew older, something strange began to happen. Those people who told you that success was within reach and something you could grasp started to tell you the complete opposite.

Suddenly those same people are putting your dreams down. For example, does the following sound familiar, in any way, shape, or form?

“Oh, sorry. Did I just hear you say you want to be a pop singer? That’s not possible. You can’t do that; you can’t be the next Madonna. She’s the exception to the rule, she just got lucky. You gotta pick something more down to earth. Stop longing to be a famous pop singer. Why aren’t you thinking about going to college like your friends? What are you going to do for a living? Seriously, you cannot make a decent living singing. How are you going support yourself?”

There are literally hundreds of variations on this same theme. You can’t be the next (famous person!) because (they got lucky! they’re the exception!) Better go try your hand at something else, right? Right…?

Instead of dreaming these amazing dreams for yourself and being filled with the passion that you can achieve anything, you’re slowly taught to conform. After all, everybody wants to live like everybody else. That’s just a given. Who wants to show off, be amazing, and rock at life if you can live like the Joneses next door? Duh.

Where does this “You can’t do that!” stuff come from?

If you’ve ever had to deal with the assault-like verbal grenades like the one I just mentioned above, you know what it feels like for people to totally demean your aspirations. It’s no fun at all.

Why would people who care about your future dish out advice like that? In my experience, the cause is linked to two main reasons:

• A lack of courage. If somebody is trying to give you advice but it sounds directly opposite of what you want to hear, consider that he/she might be speaking from a mindset of fear. People who want to see you succeed and want you to be happy might be drawing from their own feelings of being fearful of success when they offer you up terrible advice. Take what they say with a grain of salt. They might not necessarily mean to put a damper on your dreams, but they have their own limiting beliefs that are darkly shading the advice they give you.
• Fear of your success. What would your success mean to these people if you went out, achieved what you set your mind to, and shattered their expectations to pieces? Would they truly be happy for you? Would they sulk and have resentment when they see what kind of person you’ve become? Your success might force them to reevaluate the boring life they’re living; your success would be a threat to their stability.

As you can tell, its not necessarily that these people don’t want you to succeed, but they’re afraid of realizing what your success would mean to them. (Also remember that things such as limiting beliefs can also skew judgement when these people give you advice.)

Come on! Be like everybody else! (Or not?)

It’s sometimes extremely difficult to break away from what everybody else is saying and go down your own brilliant path, especially when the status quo is pressuring you to stay exactly the same. But unfortunately for you, if you begin believing that your dreams aren’t worth clinging onto and turning into your own reality, your life starts to become a pale copy of everybody else’s.

What is it to be like everybody else, anyways? Does it mean you eat a lot of foods that shouldn’t ever be put into your body? Does it mean you slowly chip away your time at a 9 to 5 job, wishing you had the freedom to do anything else with your time? Does it mean you spend years of your life paying (possibly tens of) thousands of dollars to go to college to graduate and find yourself in one of these terrifying jobs?

Let’s be honest – who really wants to live like everybody else? Deep down inside, everybody’s thinking they could be the exception to the rule. Everybody wants to be a somebody who’s fabulous.

Who doesn’t want to be the person who can make their entire living online? Who doesn’t want to be the person who has the healthiest diet for themselves? Who doesn’t want to be the person who’s an extremely talented songwriter and brilliant singer? We call these people the exceptions to the norm. These people are the the people who others look up to, but everybody discourages their friends from becoming. These people are the ones who followed their dreams and made something of themselves.

What do you do when people attempt to curtail your dreams and bring you back “down to earth?” I hope you ignore these people. I hope you ignore all of them. Seriously. Are you honestly going to start believing these people, that you’re dreaming too much or that your head is in the clouds? Why would you deny yourself your very own dreams? Why would you even want to pretend that your aspirations don’t exist?

Letting somebody else tell you that you can’t do something is effectively giving away your power to create your own life. It’s like you’re conceding defeat.

These people may give you reasons that your dreams won’t work. And for a while, you may believe these reasons and you may even make up more reasons that your dreams will never work out in your favor. But behind all of the excuses you imagine up, do you really know the script that’s running through your mind?

“Oh, you’re right, (other human being). I could never do something like that. What was I even thinking? Thank you for helping me realize that! I won’t bother trying any longer.”

Think about that whiney, loser-like script for a moment. Doesn’t it sound utterly ridiculous to you? Somebody says you can’t do something, and you tell them right back “Oh. You’re right! I can’t!” What ever happened to your power to create the life you’ve always dreamed of? Did you suddenly forget that only you have that power and it can’t be given away to anybody else? 

Don’t ever for a second doubt in yourself or in your dreams, no matter how big your dreams are or far off in the future you may be dreaming. If you don’t pursue your very own dreams, your life will wind up like everybody else’s. Dull. And pretty soon, you will try to convince everybody else to put away their power and to settle for a dull, dull life, just like yourself.

Be the Exception

The beauty and richness of human life isn’t found through mimicry of other people. It’s from transcending that little snag and becoming somebody who’s totally unique, so unique that their values, beliefs, and accomplishments can’t be classified as normal. It’s then that you become the exception.

Being the exception doesn’t necessarily mean you have to make astute, amazing scientific discoveries or change the pop music landscape for generations to come. It simply means you have to live true to yourself, without succumbing to other’s expectations of what you should become. It means going after your dreams in the face of everybody else, whether those dreams are super small or immensely huge.

It’s tough. Going after your desires is tough to do in a world that’s knocking on your door and reminding you 24/7 to be normal, reminding you that if you don’t act normal something is wrong with you. But you know what? The reward for being the exception is far greater than the reward for being identical to everyone else.

Nobody remembers the average people. Everybody remembers the exceptions. The average people don’t bother trying to touch other people’s lives with their skills, knowledge, and presence. The exceptional people reach out to other people and strive to make a difference in somebody else’s life, every single day.

Which of the two paths will you be choosing today? Will you become the exception?

In this post, I explain how I create my creative works, from a new blog post to an original piano piece to a speech I’m preparing to give. Hopefully by the time you’re finished reading this post, you have a stronger idea of how to express your own ideas more fully. As you can tell, this post is immensely long, but incredibly detailed.

I’m not giving you the magic wand so you can make your ideas miraculously appear better with no effort. I’m giving you the instruction manual on how to make your ideas work for you. Especially in the blogosphere, there’s a growing problem with people having absolutely brilliant ideas but a really terrible time expressing said ideas. I’ve seen people think up the most insanely original ideas ever that nobody else has even thought of before, but when push came to shove, they couldn’t fully express those ideas in a form that that makes any sense.

I’m determined to fix that problem in this post. In this post, I explain six simple steps you can use to go from having a fluffy idea to a tangible product. My goal for you is to be able to take any creative idea that you have and turn it into a reality.

These six steps are fairly simple. First, you choose an idea that you like. Next, you pick a medium for your idea and you create an outline, shelling out that idea in full. Then you compose a full rough copy drawn from your outline; afterwords, you edit that copy as much as needed until you hit perfection. Last, you put the finishing touches on your final copy and you share your finished product with the world!

So what are we waiting for? Let’s dive into the first step!

1. Think of an idea.

For any creative projects to seriously take shape, you need to start with a fresh idea.

Ideas can come from anywhere. They can be suggested to you by other people. You can go around looking at other people’s various works, and think about what’s missing from their products. What didn’t other people create yet that you can present? What new flavor can you add to the mix? Ideas also can be found via inspiration, like taking a walk and simply thinking about various topics. (This is one of my personal favorite ways to create ideas for future blog posts.)

You’ll probably get lots of really bad ideas, but a couple of ideas you come up with will be golden. Take note of those golden ideas; those ideas are the ones you want to expand on.

I recently wrote on this blog about how to create brilliant ideas. You can read that post if you’re having a bit of trouble at this stage.

If you’re still having trouble creating ideas, just ask yourself these questions: What do you want to share with the world? If you were given a platform and could speak to a million people, how would you creatively express yourself? What would you want to say to all of them?

2. Pick a medium for your idea.

So you’ve come up with your amazing idea that’s going to change mankind. Fabulous! Now what do you do?

The next two steps require you to start fleshing out your idea. Now is the time you figure out what kind of medium you want your idea to reside in, and what kind of structure your idea is going to have. First, let’s discuss the aspect of the medium for your message:

A medium is a simply the format your idea is expressed in. For example, if you’re a personal development guru and you want to speak about productivity, what kind of format are you going to put your idea in? Are you going to write a detailed blog entry? Do you want to create a short eBook? Do you want to talk through your topic in a cleverly produced podcast?

Picking a medium can be tough. If you pick the wrong medium, it can totally backfire on you and cause your message to appear not as strong. If writing an eBook might be stretching out your idea way too thin, writing a simple blog entry could possibly be a much better fit. Speaking about a detailed topic through a video might leave the viewers confused if there are too many technical points; in this case, an organized eBook would work so much better. An uplifting story told through a blog post might not have the same emotional impact as if you recorded a 10 minute podcast detailing the trials and tribulations of the story.

In any case, no matter what your idea is, the goal is to choose the best medium for your message, as Steve Pavlina would say. Find something that creates a great balance between what you have to say and what format you want to use to express what you say. Overall, your chosen medium should reflect the content of your message.

3. Create a basic outline.

With your medium now chosen, it’s time to sketch out your idea in an easy outline form.

The purpose of the outline is to give your idea a clearer shape. You want to be able to take the outline you create and then used that to chisel out a rough draft of your creative work. If you skip directly from Step 2 to Step 4, the final form of your idea might not be as coherent and clearly expressed as you’d like it to be.

Outlines can come in all shapes and sizes, so use what works best for you. Some people like to create a simple bulleted list of all of their main points; I’m a big fan of this. To create my outline of this article, I used a pencil and a sheet of computer paper. I envisioned this article in my mind and spoke the entire article out loud, imagining that I was giving a podcast of this topic to an audience from ProBlogger. As I hit a main point, I would write that in with a 1.), 2.), and so on. From there, as I would detail each numbered point, I would write in more bullets and quick words and phrases that describe those main points. By the time I was done speaking, I created a terrific outline that could guide me through writing this entire post.

If you need to do any research for your idea, now is the time you’d research what you need. You want to make sure that when you write your rough copy, you’re able to express yourself with what you mean about 95% of the time. It’s okay if your rough copy is  not absolutely clear the first time around, but you want to be able to hit near clarity. A strong outline will help you.

At the very least, your outline needs to have the main aspects of your original idea. For example, if you’re preparing to give a speech, your outline needs to at least have the main points of what you’re going to be talking about, along with all of the sub-points. Then after you get the basics of your outline written out, the next step is to write down any examples, phrases, and whatever else you want to be including in your message. You do this so you don’t accidentally forget anything important.

I know it’s a bit weird to create your outline after you pick your medium, but to me it makes perfect sense: An outline you prepare for a speech will be different than if you’re creating an outline to compose a symphony, and both of those will be totally different than if you’re creating an outline for an eBook. The outline you’re going to be writing will reflect what kind of medium you’ve chosen.

4. Write your rough copy.

So you thought up an idea. You picked the perfect medium for your message, and you created your excellent outline. The next step is to express yourself into your medium while following your outline.

If you’re writing a new blog entry, write out your entire blog post. If you’re writing an eBook, do the same thing, only in smaller chunks. If you’re composing a song, it’s time to compose that entire song. If you’re preparing to give a speech, go to the mirror along with your outline and start speaking!

Remember to use your outline! Stick to your outline as close as possible. Of course, while you’re writing, there’s a good chance that a few of the points you made in your outline just won’t make the final cut. That’s okay. The idea of the outline is to give you a basic structure that you can use write from; stick to that structure. Your outline is what’s going to give your work a cohesive, whole feeling when you’re done writing. Also, remember to use your most important ideas from your outline in this rough copy – don’t leave anything important out!

While creating your rough copy, try to get as close to perfection as you can and make your ideas as presentable as possible. There are a couple of reasons for this. One, it’s going to make the editing process so much easier when you go back to edit after you’ve finished. Two, you’re going to feel as if you’re creating something worthwhile. Instead of kind of expanding on a lot of little ideas, you’re going to be working on an entire creative work.

5. Go back and edit what you’ve created.

So now that you have finished an almost complete work, it’s time to go back and edit what you’ve done so far.

Editing, if done correctly, will actually take you a lot longer than you probably are thinking. You’re going to be looking out for a lot of things while editing. Here are some questions you can ask yourself during the editing process:

• Do your words and phrases make sense? A lot of times, you’ll write or say something that you think will sound amazing, but in reality it simply doesn’t. For writers, check to see that you have your basic grammar intact and that you chose appropriate, colorful words to describe what you’re speaking about.
• Does the order and organization of your work make sense? Make sure you’re writing, explaining, or composing everything in a very clear, very concise way. Don’t leave anything up to chance. If you’re not sure that you’re clear enough, you probably aren’t. Ask around if you’re worried. The last thing you want is to leave somebody bewildered after reading or listening to what you have to present.
• Did you do your very best? Is what you’re going to present to the world the very best you have to offer? This may seem like the ultimate silly question to ask when you’re in an editing spree, but you want what you have to say to be totally you. You want it to be a work of creative self-expression, an extension of yourself. If what you’ve composed in your rough copy isn’t your very best, go back and change it up. Make sure what you have to say is the very best of what you have to offer.

There’s a bit of leeway after you get to this step – you might find yourself bouncing between multiple rough copies and editing them all at once. That’s totally okay. Occasionally if you’re doing something that’s very complicated, you can’t help but compose multiple copies.

Be ruthless with yourself. Editing is a tough skill to master, but it’s completely worth it in the long run. Your work will appear much more thoughtful, organized, and impressive if you take the time to trim the fat off of your creative works.

Don’t rush this step, either. Especially if you’re created something that’s long, it’s going to feel like an eternity to edit everything. That’s just to be expected. Slow yourself down, take everything word by word, note by note. You want something that’s your best; you want something that’s perfect.

6. Share your finished project!

You’re done editing. Now is the time to read, hear, or see what you’ve created one last time before you begin sharing it with other people. Go back to the questions I asked above in the editing section and ask yourself those questions again for the final time.

Make sure that what you’ve created is truly the very best of what you can offer.

Creative work needs to be shared, right? Now is the fun part – now you get to share what you’ve done with everybody else! (Okay, so at least it’s the most fun part for me!) Speak that speech in front of everybody. Create a video of your brand new song and share it with the world. Publish that new blog post and get it out there! Pass your work around to your family and friends, promote your work on forums, get people to notice what you’ve done. Believe in what you’ve created, you worked hard!

* * * * * * * 

To create an awesome blog post – every single time – takes practice. But you need to have some strong basics to start from. I hope this post will truly help you when creating any kind of creative work.

So… what are you waiting for? Why aren’t you off creating something new today? Come on, get to it Remember to start at Step 1!

Timeboxing is a fairly simple time management technique. When you have a task to accomplish, you set aside a certain amount of time to complete that task. You do your very best to complete that task, regardless of the final outcome. For example, say you’re writing a new blog entry on timeboxing. You give yourself an hour to do that task in, and however it comes out is how it comes out.

With timeboxing, the quality of what you’re producing is still very important, but the overall concept is to get a finished product churned out for you to use and for people to see. The end goal is a completed item, task, or project. You can assign any amount of time (30 minutes, an hour, two hours, etc.) to any task (cleaning, writing, reading, etc.) In addition, you can always go back and revise what you’ve hammered out.

I often use timeboxing when I’m practicing piano. Oftentimes, when you’re practicing a certain skill, like learning a musical instrument or a sport move, it’s easy to practice for hours on end but not get any real work accomplished. The more you practice, the worse your actual practicing becomes. Timeboxing practice into a limited amount of time forces you to make intelligent decisions based on the time you have and what needs to be done. If I give myself exactly one hour to practice, am I going to diddle around playing showtunes? Of course not! I’m going to be practicing Chopin. In this case, timeboxing works very effectively. When time becomes scarce, my practice sessions shoot up in value. Less time to mess around, more time to buckle down and get to work.

Here are some other useful uses for timeboxing:

• Highly creative work. Creative work needs to get done one way or another, and oftentimes amazingly creative people don’t bother with setting deadlines. But if no tangible work gets completed, how will the world see their gifts? Use timeboxing to get that creative work done, such as composing a song or writing a blog entry.
• Finishing off lots of little tasks together. Can you finish off 20 little things that need to be done today in a course of an hour? Batch them all together and knock them off one by one instead of doing one here, one there. Saves time and energy.
• Tedious, ugly, massive projects. Most goals that one will try to obtain in life can be broken down into numerous projects. Some of these projects will be enjoyable to blaze through; others, not so much. Use timeboxing to make an impact in completing the nastier projects bit by bit.
• Stuff you just wanna get done. Some stuff isn’t fun to do, but it’s not exactly something that can fall into a category. If it looks like a huge, looming, annoying project, use timeboxing to knock it off of your to-do list once and for all.

Remember, the goal of timeboxing is a totally finished item. You can always go back and revise if you feel the need to later, depending on the item itself.

What can you be timeboxing and completing today? Why haven’t you done it yet? Get to work!

Reading this sent me into a think mood . How many of us honestly strive to live by Trump’s values? In our careers, do we give a sincere attempt to put out our best products, or do we settle for the average? Do we reach out for a genuine impact on other people, or do we figure a simple smile and “Nice job!” is enough of a reward for a job not so well done?

Are you constantly perfecting what you’re creating?

If you’re a blogger, are you constantly trying to out-do yourself every single time to create work with a higher impact? Or are you stuck in a complacent writing rut? If you’re a musician, are you practicing to become even better, day in and day out? Or have you settled for being an okay guitarist, playing average-level songs?

People want the highest quality they can afford. They hate to settle for the mediocre, the bland, the boring. If you’re not producing and putting out the highest quality content you possibly can, what’s the point of creating new content? People won’t flock to what you have; they’ll gravitate towards something even better.

For everything you ever attempt to do in life, you should always be asking yourself, “Is this the absolute best I can do?” If it’s not, immediately start doing your best.

This is silly mindset to some people, but to me, it’s really an interesting, awesome way to live. I want to be the best that I can be, no matter what I’m putting my mind to. If I’m playing the piano for a group of people, I want to be playing at the best level I can, whether that group is of 5 people or 150. If I’m writing a blog post, I want that post to be the absolute best I can make it, whether it’s going to be read by 5 people or 15,000. 15,000 would be nice, though.

Constantly demand perfection from yourself and from others. If you’re creating something, don’t settle for a product that’s just okay. Really, honestly try to top yourself each and every time. Always go bigger, go better, do something more interesting. 

Are you striving to leave an impact on others?

Part of the reason I love what I do is because my work can leave such a profound effect on people. Okay, I know that’s bit of a cliche thing to say, but in my experiences it’s totally true.

The strongest memories I have of performing at the piano aren’t necessarily of me being on stage performing, but of the reactions I get afterwords when I’m meeting the crowd. It’s an amazing feeling to see the effect I had on so many people who had the opportunity to listen to me play; it’s like I want to rush on stage and perform once more just to see the audience’s reaction once last time.

Of course, my feelings toward blogging is the same thing. I might not be able to see everybody’s face to face reaction to my writings, and it might take a while for some of the ideas I’m explaining online to trickle down into real life and make an impact in other’s lives. But regardless of how much time that takes, I love communicating what I know through these posts. I love the positive comments and feedback I get. I love knowing that somehow, somewhere, what I’ve said here sincerely made a difference in somebody’s life.

The bulk of your life’s hours are going to be spent whittling away at your career(s). But are you doing work that truly leaves an impact on others? When you explain what you do to others and when your products get into other people’s hands, what are their reactions? Happy, enthusiastic, and ecstatic? Or bored, lackluster, and apathetic? Are they thrilled as much as you are about what you get to do every day? Do they even care? What kind of an impact are you truly leaving on the people you meet?

If you’re not impacting other human beings as much as you know you can be, it might be time to find a better fitting career.

The bottom line is simple: step up your game. Only demand perfection out of yourself. Strive to connect to other people. Make real human to human connections in everything you do.

Of course, that leads full circle to why I don’t read self-help blogs in the first place: The information most spew out is simply terrible. In a field where self-expression, creativity, and originality rank up there as supreme virtues that everybody should adhere to, it’s mystifying and sadly ironic that these bloggers haven’t figured out how to be original yet.

I know, I know. Everybody has a story to tell, everybody is unique in their own “special” way, blah blah blah. I totally get that, that weird, frilly aspect of self-help is not lost on me. But I can’t help but wonder if these people haven’t ever read a personal development book in their lives. Have they thought about the immense amount of awesome ideas in said books? Have they applied these said ideas in their own lives?

Feeding into my misery over the state of self-help blogs is how each blog appears to be Xeroxed copies of one another. Every blog seems consistently churn out posts on the same old, dead topics: goal setting, productivity, time management. That’s not necessarily a bad array of topics to choose from, but once they’re done to death in the same exact ways, you begin to question why you’re reading these blogs in the first place. Do you really need to know another 20 simple tips to boost your productivity? Do you really need to question your gnawing suspicion that the list sounds oddly familiar?

This is why creating fresh ideas in any field is paramount to your success. For bloggers, nobody – and I mean nobody – wants to read something that’s been talked about for the last four years. You need to be enlightening, creative, entertaining, and emotional. Above all, you need to have brilliant ideas, ideas that shine above the rest. Yes, implimentation of your ideas is just as vital (otherwise the world won’t see your smarts); however, a great idea with great execution is impressive and something everybody and their mother loves.

But how do you create interesting ideas? Well, that’s what I’m here for. Following are three simple ways you can use to create better, fresh ideas.

1. Draw from your past experiences.

There are multiple emotional ways you can reminisce about your past: shock and awe, senseless longing, confusion, a strange mix of hatred and apathy. Some ways are strangely empowering, some act as a nasty downer. Uh oh!

When you’re trying to create fresh ideas, especially in a seemingly overcrowded field wrought with repackaged material (while competing tooth and nail for the same audience share), it’s difficult to throw your own originality into the heavy mix. So do something that’s ridiculously simple: draw from your own past experiences.

Luckily for you, your life experiences are totally your own. Nobody else has quite the same muddled, interesting mix of upbringing, values, friends and family, job, past times, and anything else you could possibly imagine. Your experiences are uniquely shaded with your own personal colors, painted from your life experiences.

If you’re having trouble brainstorming ideas that truly resonate with you, draw from your own past experiences. For self-help bloggers, do you have stories you can share with others about personal struggles and successes with goal setting? Have you unknowingly been using a personal twist on an old topic, a personal tip or trick you can share with the rest of the world?

People long to be connected to; they want to feel as if they have a kinship with you. Let them. If you’re a lyricist, can you tap into your memories to create a bond with your audience? If you’re suggesting improvements to your church to reach out to the youth in your community, can you look back at old service bulletins and see what works and what didn’t work, and try your hand at some of those ideas again?

The past can be a great source of inspiration and ideas. Sharing those experiences with the world can open the door to more creative self-expression. Instead of repackaging the same ideas through and through, you’ll be using your own life as a basis for what you write and share and how you connect to other people.

2. Brainstorm. A lot.

For the sake of an example, say you’re a blogger. A pretty standard question you might ask yourself is, “How can I differentiate myself from every other blogger out there in my chosen field?” From there, you might think a novel writing style would be in order, so you could then ask yourself the the question, “How can I create a more unique voice for myself?” From there, you brainstorm: Will you write sounding more excited? Snarky? Apathetic? Uplifting? Destroying? Flirty? You keep brainstorming until a certain style totally resonates with you; then you test it out. See where it takes you. The more ideas you can create, the better chance that you’ll find something that clicks with you that’s also totally original.

Brainstorming can be a painstakingly boring task. To create amazing ideas and a quality product that other people will stand with mouths gaping wide in awe at, you need to go through a lot of riff-raff to get to that point. Sometimes your best ideas will be some of the first ones you create; sometimes your best ideas will come very late in the game.

To illustrate this point, let’s take a very quick look at some classical music history. We all know Mozart was a very prolific composer, but did you know he wrote nearly 200+ pieces of music before he created his first amazing masterpiece at age 18? That’s a lot of mediocre, okay, average ideas. Beethoven wrote some of his very best work after he became deaf, after 25 straight years of composing. That’s self-discipline.

The Catch-22 of this wonderful suggestion is the fact that you might have to keep brainstorming. Over, and over, and over again. Sometimes the brainstorming never really stops. However, as time goes by, your brainstorming sessions become easier. You become in tune with yourself and what works (and doesn’t work). The quality of your ideas goes up. You’re able to create fresh ideas quite quickly at that point.

3. Do more thinking and less doing; ask pointed questions about diverse topics.

Pretend – for the sake of a strange, enlightening example – that there were no flavors of potato chips other than “Original.” Whenever you got a hankerin’ for potato chips, you’d dash to the store to buy that one simple flavor. It’d get boring fast, wouldn’t it?

Now what if you accidentally put a very slight amount of BBQ sauce on those potato chips one day? Yikes! Now you’ve created something slightly brand new, but totally different. You market your new creation as BBQ potato chips while everybody else keeps making Original potato chips. You rake in the dough and accolades while others simply lag behind in their old ways.

One of the major problems (and one of my number one complaints) in the personal development community is not enough time is doing thinking about topics while too much time is done writing. That’s not to say bloggers shouldn’t be posting 3 times a week or so and developing a base, but what’s the point if you’re not constantly bombarding your brain with new information? Your blog posts would feel stale, you would stall out and stagnate, just like the aforementioned potato chip business.

If you’re a self-help blogger writing about something such as acceptance, don’t just write about acceptance and what it means to other people. Ask what acceptance truly encompasses. Really think about what it means to you. Take your hands away from the keyboard for a while, take a walk, and just think about the topic. What kinds of personal stories do you have about acceptance? How did you learn lessons dealing with acceptance; how did that color how you view acceptance and the world? Does acceptance have any relationship with seemingly non-related personal development topics, such as self-discipline or productivity? Can you see hidden relationships that others might pass up in regards to those non-related topics?

When you’re given something to create ideas around, take the time to really think about that topic. Ask those pointed questions, really dig deep into what you’re thinking of. The gemstones of ideas don’t lie on the surface; they lie deep below the ground where others refuse to mine. It can be difficult; it can be painful; it sometimes can be irritating. But it’s so incredibly rewarding.

So… what are you waiting for? Get to creating those ideas, right now!

It’s easy to get wrapped up in the bad things and lose focus of your ambitions when hard times crash into you like a 300 pound football player. It’s completely understandable, too. That’s a natural reaction.

Taking responsibility for your life – complete, total 100% responsibility – is one of the things that has gotten me through some of the toughest, most aggravating times of my life. It’s a difficult area to master, but learning what total responsibility is and then applying it to your life is richly rewarding.

Responsibility comes in two steps. First, you need to accept what your life is right at this very moment. Next, you need to take full responsibility for the changes that you can create in your life. Only you can make those changes happen.

Acceptance

A family member passes away. You lose your job. An unexpected medical emergency comes up. Something bad happens.

Or it may not even be an event like that. Maybe you feel totally stressed out from your daily load of schoolwork. Or you keep grinding your wheels at your job day in and day out but you just can’t quite seem to get ahead.

When something terrible happens or you feel as if your life is on a downward spiral, take a step back. Take a deep breath. Think about how your life looks as a whole. What parts are going amazingly well? What parts do you feel are crashing down on you? Try to look at the entire picture, not just the aspects of life you’re having trouble with. See how what you’re going through fits into the big picture.

Focusing solely on what’s going wrong in life is what most people decide to do. And as a first reaction, that’s natural. When I accidentally slide on ice getting into my car, the first thing I think isn’t “Gee, I wonder what I’m going to have for lunch?” It’s more like “Shoot! That hurt! Am I bleeding anywhere?” First reactions to any event zoom in on what happened. They’re like a snap decision in a situational analysis form.

Much like you have the option of viewing a tumble on a sheet of ice in different perspectives, from the game of life you have the option of using various lenses to get better understanding of your problem. You can focus on just the problem itself. Or you can focus on your life in general and how that problem will play out in the grand scheme of things. The former view often leads people to making rash decisions over a situation – decisions that don’t work out so well in the long run. The latter view is empowering and incredibly motivating. No longer does your situation look bleak; instead, you see how everything will eventually wind up. Your decisions are made with a cool head and logical reasoning, not your emotions.

It’s like eating an amazing 3 course dinner with a so-so dessert. Are you only going to focus on how okay the dessert tastes? Or will you remember the meal as a whole and how fantastic the rest of the food was? View your life together with the problem and the problem suddenly becomes easier to manage. What was a terrible, awful situation now turns slightly less horrible, as if streams of sunlight are beaming down on your life once again.

(I’m not saying to go all Pollyanna and think your bad situation will magically disappear; however, your problem will seem not as overwhelming when viewed in a larger perspective.)

Looking at the problem in a large setting also brings about acceptance. I’m not talking about acceptance of the problem, per se. Anybody can accept an individual aspects of their life – I can accept the fact that my name is Matt, I’m male, and I play the piano. What I’m talking about is an acceptance that you realize the problem is in your life is there to stay, and you need to make major changes to quickly and effectively solve that problem.

This is the part where people stumble. Instead of looking at the grand scheme of things and hammering away at solutions, they look solely at the problem. Whatever bad thing happened in their life angers them to no end. Because they’re so intently focusing on that one bad thing, it’s impossible for them to work through it. Don’t be one of these people.

Responsibility

Accept your life how it is. Take responsibility for whatever happened. Even if something awful happened that’s quite not your fault (e.g., you are fired from your job), accept that it happened. It’s in your life now. It’s your responsibility to take that misfortune and turn it into something greater.

Nobody else can change your bad situation into a fabulous situation. If you’re jobless, it’s your choices from here on out that determine your new job or new method of earning income. If you have a medical emergency, it’s your choices that will effect your quality of life, possibly for the rest of your life. If you want more happiness, you have to accept that you’re unhappy, and then take responsibility for your decisions here on out that can make you ecstatic about life.

This is another part where people totally stumble. They “get” the acceptance parts, they “understand” the responsibility aspect of this whole thing, but then they start pointing fingers. The blame game begins at full speed. For example, many people blame everything else – large companies, their friends, society’s standards of what’s beautiful – when trying to justify the fact that they’re overweight. But these people are completely wrong. It’s not the fast food company’s fault that you’re overweight and suffer from a low self esteem because of your body image. I wouldn’t even say it’s the fashion magazine’s fault. What you have is an acceptance and responsibility problem. Accept who you are, flaws and all. If you don’t like those flaws, take on the responsibility to change them.

Stop yourself from waiting on the permission of others to take charge of your life. That’s a classic symptom of total denial of responsibility. “I wish I could do X, but I’m waiting on Y to help me out first…” is a lie, 99% of the time. There might be some instances where you need another person’s specific help and you’ll be forced to wait on them until they have the time. However, most people use this as a bogus excuse to procrastinate.

Your decisions produce outcomes. Acceptance of how your life is right now and taking on the power of all that responsibility is what’s going to help you through the darkest hours of your life.

What are you putting off finally accepting as a reality in your life? How can you claim responsibility for what has happened and change it to what you dream of?

It’s your life. Your responsibility.

Keeping track of all of these separate ideas can be a bit of a challenge. Fortunately, I’ve developed a small, quick system that truly helps me keep all of my ideas in line, so I don’t miss a beat. Here are the two major components of my system.

1. Notepad on the computer. For ideas I don’t particularly care enough to develop any further than idea form, I use Notepad. I type up my ideas in a running list, with a separate file for each set of different ideas. When it comes time to develop an idea further, I use a loose leaf piece of paper to do my brainstorming on, and then I transfer that brainstorming map or list into a plan or separate document that I can take further action on.

2. A notebook. There are some subjects that I would rather brainstorm on paper than use a computer. For these subjects, I keep track of my ideas using a simple notebook. I devote one 70 page notebook to a particular subject, and  then I immediately write down any ideas I come up with in list form. When I want to brainstorm one of these ideas, I simply open up a blank page, write the idea at the top, and brainstorm. Two subjects that I use a notebook for are piano technique skills and personal development themes I want to explore more deeply.

And, for good measure, a few idea tips that you might find useful as well:

• Scribble down your ideas as soon as they come to you. Don’t wait to write down an idea. If you wait an hour to get a hold of your notebook or computer, the idea you had might be gone. Ideas are like shooting stars – if you don’t capture what you saw in your memory at that exact moment, it’s gone forever.
• Don’t focus on modifying your idea while writing it down. Write down your idea exactly as it came to you. If you want to modify it, write the modified idea down separately. There’s always time later to change your ideas.
• Write down all ideas that come to you. No idea is a bad idea while it’s still in idea form. Writing out every single idea, even the stupid ones, can act as a cure for mental fog. Because your mind won’t be boggled down with old ideas, it can be freed up to discover new ones.

Now… go and keep track of your ideas!

I recently started (activity) and my motivation is already down. I just can’t seem to do (activity) when I want to. What’s the problem? (activity) really needs to get done. What can I do to increase my motivation to tackle (activity) even if I don’t want to?

Most of the time, these posters and question askers will get some decent, average advice…mainly various standard motivational tips.

To me, these advice givers mean well, but they’re looking at the person’s problem entirely the wrong way. Most of the time, these people are not dealing with a motivation problem, but a self discipline problem. To understand this, let’s look at what motivation and self discipline are on their own.

Motivation is like a quick burst of flames that can engulf you into doing the activity you choose. It’s the inspiration that lets you write 5 amazing blog posts right in a row. It’s the energy you get when you take a day and work 6 straight hours on your life’s most important goal. It’s the nagging, caving in feeling that you get when you finally clean your garage – something you’ve been putting off for months.

Self discipline, however, is totally different. It’s your ability to trudge through mind numbingly, boring tasks with a half smile on your face, knowing the work you’re getting done will pay off 20-fold in the future. It’s the voice in the back of your head on day 25 of your diet, reminding you to not even touch that piece of German chocolate cake. It’s the pressure that you put on yourself to write just one more blog entry for the week, even though you feel burnt out from practicing creative writing.

When people ask “How can I keep my motivation up?”, they’re really asking “What can I do to obtain a higher level of self-discipline?”

Motivation works more as an internal gauge at the beginning of a new goal. If you have a brilliant amount of motivation when you start a goal, there’s a pretty good chance that’s the goal you were meant to be working on. If something inspires you so much that you can’t wait to take action on it, at least in the early stages, that’s an awesome sign. If you’re not registering these feelings when you start a new project, your heart isn’t in what you’re doing. Take up something else.

Motivation generally drops down a week or two after a new mission begins. You get through the first easy part, the fun stuff. Now the real work begins. You now have to perpetually keep up what you’re doing to get the results you want. This is the part where people drop new habits and new goals in favor of living their old life. Not a good move, not a good move.

This is also the stage where people try to solicit others for motivational advice, thinking their problem has to do with a lack of motivation. On the outside, this makes perfect sense. “If motivation carried me through the first week,” these people think, “it can keep me going even further.”

But therein lies the problem with this line of thinking. If motivation always decreases, you’re going to be struggling in an uphill battle to constantly revive your lifeless motivation. That’s not smart; that’s not in the least productive. Ditch this dead end thinking.

Self discipline is what aids you through these rough stages until your motivation automatically resurfaces. Instead of asking “What can I do to increase my motivation,” ask yourself, “What can I do to utilize my self discipline? How can I use self discipline to tackle this problem?” You can’t always count on your motivation to be there when you need it, but you can always call up the power of your own self discipline.

Self discipline training is hard, tough work. It’s not easy to write a brand new 1,000 word blog post in one sitting. It’s not easy to babysit four kids for two hours straight. It’s not easy to sit at the piano and practice for 3 hours on a tough Mozart sonata that needs work. Train up your self discipline by accepting smaller tasks and gradually working up to larger ones. You strengthen your self discipline while not allowing yourself to not be overwhelmed when a task is too much for you.

Instead of writing a 1,000 word blog post in one sitting, write 200 words at a time. Instead of babysitting four kids for two hours straight, take a smaller babysitting job to start out, maybe one kid for half an hour. Instead of sitting at the piano and practicing Mozart for three hours, break up your practice session into 30 minute chunks and work on a specific section in each chunk, taking breaks after your half hour is up. Smaller goals = better chance at success. Your burnout rate naturally decreases because the tasks are bite size. (Ironically, completing many smaller tasks is inherently motivating in itself.)

When you’re faced with a waning motivation on your life’s toughest goals, don’t think of what you can do to become more motivated. Instead think of it as a self discipline challange. Rephrase how you look at your “motivational” problems, and watch as your success rate rises.

Hyperactivity is not wasting your time wallowing in pointless, mundane activities. It’s easy to get lost in a day of internet surfing, TV watching, checking up on e-mail, Twittering, and doing a lot of other virtually worthless activities that won’t add up to any real value later on in your life. Instead, hyperactivity is choosing the one goal you want to ruthlessly go after with a vengeance and directing all of your actions and thoughts onto that goal.

Hyperactivity – in the personal development, goal setting sense – is not being impulsive, reckless, or “fly by the seat of your pants”. It’s calculated and driven. You’re getting the most amount of work done in the shortest amount of time. You’re making strategic decisions to go after the activities that give you the highest rewards in the end.

Suppose one of your 2009 goals is to create a blog that produces $3,000 worth of income a month. Difficult? A little bit. Will it take a lot of work? You betcha’. Possible? Entirely.

Using hyperactivity, you would determine exactly what you need to do for the blog to grow the quickest so you can make the most money in the shortest time possible (i.e., achieving your goal before your deadline). When you identified these activities, you would do them as quickly as possible while still keeping up a high quality of results.

If you needed to submit posts to blog carnivals, you wouldn’t think “Oh, gee, well, I don’t know if I can do that right at this time… I’m kind of busy…” Instead you would immediately do it – it’s a done deal. Essential activity identified and completed. If you needed to contact other bloggers in your field, you would put the activity on your to-do list and jump on the task as soon as it came up. If a new blog post needed to be written for the day, you would write, edit, and publish the post ASAP.

Most people think you need to work in something you love to do to be successful. That’s complete B.S.. Since when do you need to love what you do to be successful in it? The world is full of unhappy, seemingly successful people, right? The only thing different between unhappy successful people and happy unsuccessful people is the level of determination that each person brings to their own job.

Donald Trump is a master at hyperactivity and getting work done each and every single day, even during vacations. So is Madonna. You could easily become a blogging superstar in any field you chose – even if you immensely hated your field – if you only focused on what needed to be done.

The key here is choosing the right activities and doing them in the quickest amount of time. But how can you decide what to do vs. what not to do? Some questions you can ask yourself:

• What kinds of benifits will doing this activity bring me? If you’re a blogger, do you get an increase in traffic? Another post to add to your archives? Another income stream? Depending on your goals, you’re going to be wanting to focus more on certain tasks than others.
• Are there any other easier ways to be achieving this goal than what I’m considering? If you want to establish online connections, are you going to focus more on personally e-mailing other bloggers or sending them quick messages on Twitter? If you want to build traffic, are you going to focus more on blog carnivals, blog comments, or forum posts? If you’re tweaking the layout of your blog, are you going to make it more streamlined so visitors can find their way around the site easier or better at income producing? Think of all the outcomes of various possibilities and stack them up against each other in your mind.

Once you find the right activities you want to accomplish, put them in a to-do list in order of most important to least important. If you can’t decide on an order, write them in any order – you’ll be going through your entire list anyways. Read the first task, and do it. When it’s done, read the second task, do that immediately. If you need to take a break, do it in between tasks, not while you’re working on something. Breaks should be quick and refreshing. As soon as your break is up, move on to the next activity.

Hyperactivity sounds draining, but in reality it’s incredibly motivating and worthwhile. You build self discipline by pushing yourself to get through beneficial tasks that might otherwise slide to the side. You reach your goals much faster than you’d ever believe because you’re working so intently on what needs to be done.

Do you really need to check how many people visited your site 5 times a day? Do you really need to be working on that e-book nobody is going to be reading because you haven’t built your traffic up yet? Do you really need to be checking your e-mail 10 times a day, just to see if that one person has returned your request? Cut out nonessential tasks. Only do what’s necessary. Do as much of it as possible.

What’s one of your goals that if you went at with a fierce sense of determination could you make a huge dent in? What if you went at that same goal with an identical attitude for 30 days straight?

So what are you waiting for? Get started today!

Today’s secret has to do with “extreme goal achievement” – what are the specific steps you can take to always get amazing, fast results when you embark on achieving your goals?

Think quick. Act even quicker. Get results now.

If you suddenly found yourself under the ice in a frozen lake, seemingly unable to escape, what would be racing through your mind? Chances are you would feel extremely claustrophobic, frantically trying to escape the sheer coldness of the icy water surrounding your body. You would be smashing the thin layer of ice above you with your fists with all your might, eventually shattering a hole in the ice above your head, big enough to escape.

To you, this might be the world’s strangest metaphor. To me, this is the perfect example of how the process of achieving your goals should ultimately feel like. You must think and act quickly. If you didn’t get the results you want, modify your game plan slightly and keep on going.

So as you can see, there are three major parts of extreme goal achievement – thinking quickly, acting swiftly, and obtaining the results from your actions.

1. Thinking quickly. The most successful people in the world have a knack for thinking quickly on their feet. They see an opportunity, a problem, a possibility, and they immediately brainstorm action plans for success. They don’t wait for permission from another person for them to start.
2. Acting swiftly. Once these people have plans ready to go, they immediately get started. They take the initiative and go for what they want, acting as if they’re going to get exactly what they dream of. The most successful people don’t wait for others to give them the green light to start. They begin ASAP.
3. Obtaining the results. The world’s most successful people gather their results and observe what worked and what didn’t work. They make immediate changes to their goals and plans, and then they try something fresh and new. They don’t sit around and balk at horrible results; they accept the fact that what they tried didn’t work, and then they try something brand new.

The easy part is reading about the three parts of extreme goal achievement. The hard part is applying them to your life to consistently get great results. To do this, you have to ingrain this method of thinking into your memory.

Make this line of thinking a way of life.

Thinking like this is a habit. It’s a total way of life.

Most people think incredibly successful people, from entertainers to athletes to business people, got to super-stardom in their respective fields through a blind stroke of luck. And in some cases, that’s what propelled them to achieve the results they earned. Sometimes exactly what a person needs is an unforeseen opportunity for them to shine so their talents can be fully recognized by everybody else.

But in most cases, this isn’t what happens. The top people do what I described above. They think quickly when they see a brand new opportunity arise that hasn’t been taken advantage of yet. Once they formulate a plan, they act swiftly, trying to score the results they desperately dream of obtaining. And once they finish their plan, they obtain and glance at their results. What succeeded? What failed? What can they do even better next time to obtain even better results?

98% of people aren’t like this. Most people are fairly lazy. They really don’t care to rise above the mediocre. If you asked them where they want to be a year from now, they might be able to mumble a fuzzy, vague answer at best; if you asked them where they want to be five years from now, they’d have no clue whatsoever.

Then somebody comes along, blows away the entire status quo, becomes a celebrity in their chosen field, and the average people wonder why they couldn’t achieve those same results.

The amazing news is that you can achieve those results. You can become a blogger making a full time living online. You can go to college and get that degree you’ve always wanted. You can find your soulmate and start a family with them. But these things take time and effort; they require you to put forth an incredibly amount of self discipline and change your entire “normal” line of thinking.

Extreme goal achievement shouldn’t be a secret. In fact, it’s not too much of a secret anymore – I’m sharing exactly how to achieve your wildest goals right here in this post. But in the end, it’s up to you. You have to take those first steps. You have to find an opportunity, you need to create an action plan and work that plan as quickly as possible, and you need to measure up your results to find out how you can optimize your actions to work even better in the future.

It doesn’t matter what field you’re in. It doesn’t matter where you come from in life or where you want to go. It’s all the same, to everybody. Goal achievement, across the board, is universal.

Think quickly, act swiftly, obtain results should be your mantra. Say it until you’re sick of it and see if it doesn’t make you into a better, more successful person.