The Top 20 Motivation Articles at ScottHYoung.com

The archive at this website has over 700 entries. That’s a lot of reading, so even if you enjoy the articles here, there are probably quite a few articles you’ve missed over the last 3.5 years.

So, I’ve compiled a list of the best 20 motivation articles on the website.

The Top Three

I realize that 20 articles (at about 1000 words per article) is a lot of reading material. So here are the top three I would read if you’re too busy to look through all twenty:

1. What Do You Want to Do With Your Life?
2. Walk Your Talk… One Step at a Time
3. Sprinting Theory: How to Have Self-Discipline on Steroids

The Top Twenty

And, now, my picks for the best 20 motivation articles at ScottHYoung.com:

1. Average Doesn’t Mean Secure.  Just because it’s common, that doesn’t mean it’s not risky. Many people fall into the misconception that if a lot of people are doing something, it must be the safest path.
2. Walk Slowly So You Don’t Trip. The more time you give yourself to complete a goal, the more likely you’ll achieve it. By undertaking new goals with deliberate slowness, you increase the chance you can achieve lasting success.
3. How to Discover What You’re Passionate About. Enjoying playing video games isn’t the same as spending thousands of hours designing your own.  Your passion has to be something you would work exceptionally hard for. So what do you do, if there is nothing you feel that engaged about?
4. What Do You Want to Do With Your Life? What do you want to do with your life? It’s a question almost everyone asks themselves. It’s also a question I don’t believe you should bother asking in the first place.
5. The Zen of Folding Laundry, and Other Thoughts on Happiness. How to stop resisting life and accept things.
6. Overcoming the Frustration Barrier. When is the last time you went ballroom dancing, made a speech, learned a new language, took up karate or even cooked a new exotic food? When was the last time you did something out of your comfort zone?
7. You Suck. Get Over It. Life isn’t a steady escalator. Sometimes getting better requires that you first get a lot worse. If you can’t admit to yourself that you suck at something, chances are it will hold you back from future improvements.
8. The Quickest Route is Usually the Boldest. What’s a faster way to become a great public speaker: works slowly, giving a small speech every month, or finding the time and courage to tackle a big crowd every day. Tony Robbins, perhaps one of the world’s best known public speakers gave three speeches a day when he was starting out.
9. How to Stop Making Excuses. How often do you catch yourself making excuses? Instead of doing something, you come up with ways to explain your inaction?
10. Sprinting Theory: How to Have Self-Discipline on Steroids. Using this concept has been incredibly useful in breaking through my own laziness.
11. Walk Your Talk… One Step at a Time. Imperfections are part of life. I think it’s sad that some people feel that because being perfectly consistent with your values is impossible, that there is no point trying to debug the inconsistencies.
12. Arete: The Meaning of Life.  Arete is an ancient Greek word meaning excellence or virtue. Using arete as a principle for living life means that you are focused on the quality of everything you do and experience.
13. The Laziest Solution Possible. Laziness is a fairly underrated virtue. It’s synonym made the short list of deadly sins (sloth) and it is often seen as the major culprit behind a lack of success (he’s smart but he lacks discipline). I happen to think the opposite.
14. How to Not Want Things and Still Be Happy. Focus on the process to stay happy, even when you don’t get what you want.
15. Be Ambitious With Goals, Not Deadlines. I’ve always found that if you want to know how long something will take, ask someone who has already done it. Sounds obvious, but few people do it.
16. Itchy Chair Motivation. I think this principle is true of a lot of things: when everything is going perfectly, fewer things get done.
17. Avoiding Motivation Burnout. You don’t start a marathon by sprinting the first mile. So why try to run your life that way?
18. Ask for What You Want. The key reason confidence is so powerful and magnetic is simple, confident people ask for what they want.
19. If You Aren’t Getting Hate Mail, Your Writing Probably Sucks.  It’s only the ideas that are new, involve risks or push boundaries that get hate mail. Those are also the ideas that change the world.
20. How to Measure Your Degree of Persistence. How long would you be willing to work on a project, without being able to see any results from your efforts?

Thanks for reading, and making it possible for me to write for the last three years!