A visual image of motivation

When I think about motivation, I get a visual image related to trains. I love trains, perhaps because my dad always set up the Lionel’s at Christmas time to circle around the tree. To get to work I have to go through a railway crossing and it’s a great start to my day if I need to stop for a train, so long as I am in the front of the line and get to really see it.

This is the image I get when I think about motivation. There’s a whole string of railcars in a siding. There are flatcars, tankers, gondolas and boxcars. Each one is filled with some commodity. The flatcar has logs on it, the tanker is filled with vegetable oil, the gondola is filled with grain and who knows what treasures are in the boxcars.

Then a locomotive backs into the siding, and gets hooked up to the string of cars. The locomotive reverses direction, and, slowly at first, and then picking up speed, it pulls the cars out of the siding.

Without the locomotive, the cars just sit in the siding, the commodities in them useless, without value. But with the locomotive, the railcars are taken to markets where the commodities can be bought and sold. With the locomotive, the commodities have value.

And that’s how it is with motivation. We all have our dreams, our aspirations, the important changes we want to make in our lives. There are dreams of a better paying, more fulfilling job, dreams of a healthier life style, or of a loving relationship. These dreams sit in the siding of our minds. Without motivation, they just stay in our minds, and, like the commodities in the railcars left in the siding, they are useless, without value.

But when we apply motivation to them, we push them out of our minds, we push them into the universe, and we manifest those dreams in our lives. We make them become real. Our lives become the markets where our dreams and aspirations gain their value.

This is what motivation does for us. And this is why learning how to motivate yourself is so important.