You must MAKe it happen, only you and no one else. In order to MAKe it happen, we will need to break it down into three parts: Motivation, Action and Knowledge. Some people understand that the number one key to achieving their success is action. Is action the first step or is it knowledge or perhaps even motivation? Action is well known as a number one key to success and it would seem rightly so. If you don't take any action, you're not going to get any results no matter how much motivation and knowledge you have. This is true, but it does not mean that action comes first; actually, motivation comes first. Motivation however is not the number one key to all success. Motivation is the number one constant to all success.

If you have a car and you get in it to drive, putting your foot on the gas pedal is action. Knowing how to drive the car is knowledge. But what's going to happen if you have no fuel in your tank, no motivation? You're going to end up pushing your car down the freeway of life. Why? Because you lack motivation. Everything starts with motivation; your car, your life, your action and your goals. You will not get up in the morning to exercise without first having the motivation to do so. So the first thing we want to do is be able to get motivated.

Motivation
Have you ever experienced days when you slowly wake up in the morning, slump out of bed and you're just not ready to go? Where's the clock? "Smack" you strike the snooze button for another 5 minutes of sleep. Then there are days when you wake up with lots of energy ready to take off. This flip of the coin is the result of motivation. Are we excited about getting started on something this morning or not? Motivation is obviously very important since it is the basis for all your decisions. If we want to take action, we need to know where our motivation comes from and how to maintain it.

How can you stabilize motivation? When you are born, you don't get a workbook for the brain and a 1-800 number for achieving success. In addition, the important aspects of our lives are not taught in school. They don't teach you how to survive in the real world, how the mind works, how the left brain and right brain correlate or how to recall. They don't teach how to get into states for better ways of performing at school. Motivation stimulants are important because we need to know what stimulates us, what is it that gets us going. What gives us vitality and energy to take action. One of those things is understanding why you do something. Ask specific questions such as: how will this help me? Find out all the reasons perhaps using the Pain Pleasure Principle: what will happen if you don't learn this and how will that make you feel? What will happen if you do learn this and how does that make you feel?

For example, you might be watching a commercial that gets you motivated to take up self-defense. You turn on the television and a gentleman comes out and says, "This could happen to you!" The screen shows Billy, a nice young man, getting beaten badly by a street thug. The camera pans back to the spokesperson who asks some very intense questions : "What will happen if you don't learn to defend yourself? How does that make you feel?" He then goes on to inform you that the chances of being attacked are the same for everyone."It doesn't matter where you work, where you live or who you are. The chances are equal that you could be attacked, mauled, beaten, molested, shot, or mugged. This is all a reality."

After a short pause the camera shows Billy returning to the same situation yet this time with the knowledge of Martial Science, he has learned to defend himself. With his new skill he takes care of the assailant with little difficulty and walks away happy and unharmed. The announcer comes back with one last blow to your emotions and says, "What if you could defend yourself, what if you knew in your heart and mind that you could protect yourself and others, how would that make you feel?"

Motivation can be based on how it makes you feel. If you feel frightened about not being able to protect yourself, it may be just enough motivation to get you going. So next time you are about to embark upon something and you want to dig up some reasons or motivational gas, you can ask yourself the following questions:

What will happen if I don't achieve this? How does that make me feel?

What will happen if I do achieve this? How does that make me feel?

This is called the Pain Pleasure Principle or PPP. By using the carrot and the stick, we can motivate ourselves to get up and go. Every decision we make is based on the Pain Pleasure Principle.When we are asked to make a decision, we ask ourselves if we associate pain or pleasure to the answer. If I ask you, "would you like to go jump the Grand Canyon with me next week?" Your brain might scream "PAIN" and you say, "no thanks." Or your brain might yell "EXCITING" and you say, "I'll be there." Or your brain might at first indicate "PAIN" and you think, "no thanks, but wait...if I don't do it, I may lose my friends which is GREATER PAIN," and you say, "okay...I'll go."

The "don't" is a stronger motivation than the "do," i.e., pain is a greater motivator than pleasure. We will do more to avoid pain than we will do to gain pleasure.

To make this principle funny and easy to remember we can call it the Pee Pee Principle. What is Pee Pee? You guessed it, the urge to release your natural wonders. Think about it...you have pressure that makes you want to go and you have relief that gives you pleasure when you do. So when you want motivation all you have to do is link enough pain (build pressure) to not doing it and pleasure to doing it.

Motivating Goals
Have you ever had a new goal and woke up early in the morning totally excited to get started on it? Well that's one of the greatest ways to get going each day, have a goal. Get a goal that gets you out of bed. If you're still in bed and sleeping away the day, you have the knowledge but no motivation; you're a "lazy genius." If you have the motivation but no knowledge, you're an "excited idiot." Balance is the key.

Action
With the right amount of motivation, we have the drive to take action. Without action, nothing happens; there is no reaction. We take action before knowledge because to gain knowledge we have to experience and to experience, means we need to do something. You will not learn by sitting in the corner of your room all day. In order to make your life the way you want it you have to take action. Your life is your own movie and no movie is made with the director saying, "lights, camera, let's wait to see what happens."

Knowledge
Experience comes from the actions we take. If we make a plan, it is usually good to balance motivation with knowledge and then take action. However, experience is gained by failing and learning from it. None of us are born with this knowledge. We have to take action and learn from it. Intelligence is the ability to learn, ability to solve problems, the ability to grow, and the ability to survive. It is doing what you need to do, not simply knowing the square root of the world's circumference. Some people seem very intelligent, yet they can't pee without a guidebook to tell them how to find the bathroom. People are intelligent when they do what they do to survive. There can be two highly intelligent people who know absolutely nothing about what the other one does. Does this make them any less intelligent? No, it would be foolish for them to waste time learning something they are not going to use to improve their lives. I believe that you need to get a black belt - that is, a black belt in what you do. If you're an accountant don't just be average, be a black belt accountant.

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