If you want to make a difference in the world, the single most important thing you can do is consciously and deliberately choose to do work that you are passionate about.
Psychological scientists have found that the size of different parts of people's brains correspond to their personalities; for example, conscientious people tend to have a bigger lateral prefrontal cortex, a region of the brain involved in planning and controlling behavior.
Students, athletes and performing artists are often advised to imagine themselves performing successfully. But is that motivation influenced by what perspective they take when imagining their performance?
The prolific life has been characterized by abundant inventiveness and limitless creativity, and has been enshrouded in a veil of mystery - the sources of artistic inventiveness are too often viewed as out-of-reach for the average person.
Contributors get noticed and attract new friends and opportunities easily, and contributing is much easier than you might assume
I've been a professional writer since I was 17, so nearly 24 years now. I’ve made my living with words, and have written a lot of them -- more than 10 million.
If you accept a job, a relationship, or a lifestyle that you merely tolerate -- but don't appreciate -- you’re putting other concerns ahead of your own happiness.
Little research exists in the area of self-talk, although internal dialogue often influences the way people motivate and shape their own behavior.
It's a huge limiting belief to assume that going faster means you’re doing something wrong and creating too much stress.
While some psychologists still argue that people perform better when they do something because they want to, research suggests we shouldn't even make that distinction.
How does someone else’s success mean anything bad for you?
You win some, you lose some. Such are life's ups and downs.
I make a living doing what I love, and doing what you love for a living is fantastic.
I couldn't motivate myself to do anything important this morning, which is a rare thing for me. I started to doubt myself, and wonder whether anything I do is worthwhile.
We all have days when we’re just not very inspired, when we need passion and creativity breathed into us.
We all know that if you’re truly passionate about something, productivity becomes largely irrelevant.
For some people, neither the carrot nor the stick will serve as a motivational tool
What is a mind map? Put simply, it's a type of diagram, used to help you outline information in a visual format. But really, a mindmap can be anything you need it to be.
Employees who pursue creative activities outside of work may find that these activities boost their performance on the job.
When people consider a particular goal, they often worry about the time commitment: 'If I start a business now, it could take years to make it profitable.' Such thoughts reveal a total misunderstanding of the nature of time.
Excuses are lies we tell ourselves to avoid dealing with unpleasant truths. But as long as we buy into those excuses, we can never move past them.
Procrastination is in all of us, and one of the best ways to procrastinate is to do all the busy-work that makes us feel like we’re doing stuff -- while not doing the stuff we know we should be doing.
The authors of this study looked closely at the ways beginners versus experts respond to negative or positive feedback.
A reader recently asked, “How can an achievement-motivated workaholic learn to back off, relax, de-stress, and feel good about doing it? I am too driven!”
If you don’t know how, learn how. Use that fancy brain that learned how to walk, talk, and read. It’s still capable of further learning, is it not? Of course it is!
There are a lot of people who read self-improvement blogs and books, but never put them into action. Are you one?
A big part of self-discipline comes from social pressure. This is how people in the military can become very disciplined, particularly in special forces. They don’t want to hold their team back, so they have to do their best.
A common mistake people make is that they’ll spend 500 hours creating a product and then 20 hours promoting it. Then they wonder why no one is buying.
Life would be grand if we only did what our fleeting hearts wanted to do, each moment of the day. Unfortunately, the laundry, taxes and difficult conversations would never get done.
Our attention is often pulled in too many directions, leaving us feeling overloaded, distracted, chaotic, spread thinly, without focus. So what can you do?