12 Ways to Wake up Motivation Every Morning

What gets you up and moving in the morning? What motivates you to engage and live on purpose especially when the pressure is on you to slow down to a crawl?

Just like we need food and water to feed the body — we need motivation to feed the mind and heart. No matter what challenges or opportunities you face, there’s some time tested wisdom that can help. Today’s wisdom is inspired by the words of Mark Twain.

12 Ways to Wake up Motivation Every Morning

1.  Just start

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. MT

2. Take a few steps every day towards your goal

Habit is habit and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time. MT

3. Make what you do fun

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand. MT

The human race has one really effective weapon, and that is laughter. MT

4. Turn your experience into focused action

A person who has had a bull by the tail once has learned sixty to seventy times as much as a person who hasn’t. MT

A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something he can learn in no other way. MT

5. Focus on action not talk

Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work. MT

6. Stay motivated by serving others

The best way to cheer yourself is to try to cheer someone else up. MT

7. Don’t wait for no fear – be courageous in spite of fear

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. MT

8. Focus on what you can control — not what might happen

I have spent most of my life worrying about things that have never happened. MT

9. Choose your commitments carefully

It is easier to stay out than get out. MT

10. Hang out with encouraging ambitious people

Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. MT

11. Live with the end in mind

Let us so live that when we come to die even the undertaker will be sorry. MT

12. Don’t let the urgent crowd out the important

Never put off until tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow. MT

What wakes up your motivation?

*This post was adapted and updated from one I wrote over four years ago.