When are we motivated the most?
When we do what we love, use our strengths and fulfill a purpose.
You can maximize your motivation with minimalism.

And what is minimalism again?

Minimalism is all about only having and doing what we love. Filtering what’s good for us, makes us happy, fills us with positive energy and at the same time removing everything from our lives that doesn’t have a positive effect on us.

So minimalism is the key to motivation. If we become masters in being minimalists and live our lives like that, this becomes natural. We are automatically going to be much more motivated than most people around us. And simply by just surrounding ourselves with what we love. It should be common sense, that we all do it. Motivation is just one of so many rewards from living a minimalistic life.

Apply the principle of minimalism around and inside you

Besides from what surrounds us, we have to look inside our brains and apply the same principle. Our inside is part of our minimalism. Our inside and outside go hand in hand. But while we can easily look and see what’s around us, we might need a hand to look inside us to get our head around it.

Especially if we had or have to go to school … That is not a good thing. School commonly puts the focus on what we are not good at, marks mistakes instead of counting the correct answers and is totally counterproductive and outdated! Measures performance without acknowledging individuality. No, I am definitely not a supporter of the existing and most common school systems! To take extra lessons in what we are not good at is not working! And why do it then and waste the time of everyone involved? That is like a punishment that leads nowhere! Unbelievable it is still common practice.

Strengthen strengths and share them

Instead, we should find out what students are really good at and especially have fun doing. Support all students in what they love. Because their strength lays in the tasks they love and that strengthens them. And see to helping them excel and have fun. But no, schools don’t apply common sense and most businesses neither … Against what science knows! What for do we practice science if we don’t want to use the findings???

There is so much we know and don’t know, so much we can or can’t do. How should we go about ourselves? I think we have to understand, that we are all different and our brains work all differently. We have to really know who we are. And as we surround ourselves with what we love as minimalists, we should use our strengths and ask others for help with what we are not good at. Let’s share our strengths! Have fun and make the world a much better place.

We are who we are …

Our brains work in a certain way from the day we are born – and most likely before that. Our strengths are set and we can picture them as if the connections in our brains are like roads. Those connections that are our strengths we can turn into several lane motorways for high traffic. Where we are not strong at, the connections in our brains are like gravel roads. No matter how much we invest, it is never going to turn into a well working motorway …

… and we need to know who we are

So the art is to know our strengths and to consciously embrace them and really put them to work. The goal to be “well rounded” doesn’t lead anywhere: Compare yourself with a knife and sharpen only the blade where it is meant to be sharpened – not the handle, not the blunt side.

Our strengths are innate. They are what they are for our entire life and don’t change no matter what. We can only get to know them, accept them and love them. Each strength is unique and our strengths work for us! Our upbringing doesn’t change them. If we are lucky we have the freedom and are able to use them. Let’s get to know them and consciously use them! We have them anyway so we better know what they are.

Know your weaknesses and avoid those tasks

If we know our weaknesses, we know in which cases we are better off, to leave the task or situation in the hands of a friend who is an expert and trust him or her in helping us …

The best and the only well-working solution I have found so far is to take the StandOut test from Marcus Buckingham and his team. I strongly recommend you to buy his book. New, as it comes with a code which gives you access to the online test. This code can only be used once and they finance their research partially through selling the book. So a used book will have a used code … It is an investment that changes your life for the better and a real eye opener if you never had anything to do with the topic.

The test is based on the decades of research through the Gallup Institute. This is science and not a personal opinion. Take the test and get your head around the topic … Strengthfinder 2.0 by Tom Rath is not bad, but with StandOut, they nailed it.

I am an Equalizer and Influencer, by the way, and all of you will smile and understand why and how I do what I do after reading and working your way through StandOut …

Know your friends’ strengths

Get to know the strengths of your friends and workmates and learn how to communicate with them better. Knowing the strengths of others helps so much to understand where they are coming from. We learn and understand what they need, what they need from us and how we can work best together.

So if we do what we love and how we work best, all that we need is a good reason why we do what we do and we are going to be unstoppable – call it highly motivated! And we achieve it through nothing else but minimalism …

Live with others, choose your purpose

Us humans are designed to live socially. So a purpose usually involves others in a way and leads to improving a situation. And a purpose is a goal. We have to do what we love in a way we are good at it to fulfill a purpose we choose. Something important to us … As minimalists, we love to share our strengths and to have positive outcomes for everyone.

Maximize your motivation with minimalism

So how can you motivate yourself? First, start to live minimalistic. Minimalism has got to do with your mindset and it is a learning curve. Definitely, start with my closet organization course. There is a reason behind it! To really change your mindset and for good, it requires you to learn how to decide and to train the decision process. Starting with sorting out your clothing works fine even if your goal is to have better grades in school …

Start by learning to make decisions

You are not going to think and feel like a minimalist overnight. However fast and notable progress is very helpful! And in the right order: Clothing first. Only going by category works. Room by room or a little at a time and some of those ideas out there don’t work and don’t work long term and once for all. It is mainly about shuffling around what you have in a weak attempt to organize it somehow …

If you do my courses, you should have never to repeat it in your life! You are going to be organized – another side effect from minimalism. But it is really the mindset that counts. Because you are going to get to know you, appreciate you, embrace yourself and you are going to like it so much it becomes your way of life.

You never bounce back. Sorting through mementos, for example, is something that already requires some training. My site is still under construction but I am offering everything you need to get started right now and I am going to adjust it as soon as further steps are needed.

Take the StandOut test

While you start taking my course, get started with StandOut. There is so much you can learn and it also takes training and some experimenting to get up and running with it. Marcus Buckingham is the expert on this and there are tools he provides, too.

And do you have a purpose on why you are doing it? Find one … There is one for you if you are creative.

How to motivate yourself?

In general living a minimalistic life covers it. And once you live minimalistic, you are not working in a job you dislike anymore …

However, you might be a student having to attend classes … If you still go to school and have to attend subjects you are not interested in, invest as minimal time in those subjects as possible. Enough to not fail while using the Pareto Principle which means you focus on the most important 20% to achieve 80%. And learn cleverly by using flashcards to invest very little time, only repeating what’s necessary.

AnkiDroid is a great App for it! Use the time left and spend it on your favorite subjects! You want nothing below an A+ in those … And you will be surprised how you improve if you really spend time in those subjects you love and stop feeling bad about those, you are not good at. Have fun learning what you are good at. Get help from students that attend higher classes than you. Challenge your teachers in your favorite subjects. At least you are going to have something to look forward to.

You feel better if you mainly do what you love to do

If you spend most of the time with what you love to do you feel better about school than before. And you should see positive results! I bet you can get your A+. And it will be easier if you have to invest only a little bit of time to not fail your worst subjects. If you manage to apply the Pareto Principle, your grades should not change but remain the same or even get a little better.

But don’t sweat those subjects. And ask your teachers, to sum up, the most important learnings for you. Tell your teacher you have trouble following … You might be surprised how willing they are to help you out if you speak up …

How to motivate others?

We are only productive when we are motivated. A few companies understand this. Google asks their employees to spend 20% of their time working on what they want to work on and 50% of the most useful ideas come out if this time they used how they wanted to. Like for instance Gmail …

So we have to just accept this fact and not expect productivity from someone unmotivated. It is not going to happen. It is not how we work. Ask your students to put their strengths to work. Find them, support them, help them pass the subjects they dislike and that don’t come naturally to them and if there is no way to avoid them.

Always give them a purpose why they should learn something. How can they use the knowledge? How solve problems with the new skills? What is it good and useful for that you are teaching?

What are your experiences?

Leave me your comments. What questions remain open? What are your experiences? I am curious! And tell me your two top strengths from StandOut. How does it work for you? I am looking forward to hearing from you. Contact me privately if you prefer privacy.