100 Ways To Motivate Yourself, Third Edition

4. Keep your eyes on the prize

Most of us never really focus. We constantly feel a kind of irritating psychic chaos because we keep trying to think of too many things at once. There’s always too much up there on the screen.

There was an interesting motivational talk on this subject given by former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson to his football players during halftime at the 1993 Super Bowl:

I told them that if I laid a two-by-four across the room, everybody there would walk across it and not fall, because our focus would be that we were going to walk that two-by-four. But if I put that same two-by-four 10 stories high between two buildings only a few would make it, because the focus would be on falling. Focus is everything. The team that ...