The School of Mark Twain Motivation

One of the challenges you will face while grieving or navigating any difficult transition is the inner drive to keep going when you want to just stop trying. It’s important to keep getting out of bed and keep putting one foot in front of the other.

What do you need to keep your feet moving? A healthy dose of motivation.

One person who has inspired me to stay motivated is Mark Twain. His words and wise insights are short but can serve to fuel our desire to take those next steps and keep moving when everything around us is pulling us down.

10 Tips to Fuel Your Motivation from the School of Mark Twain*

1. Find encouraging people you can imitate and learn from

Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.

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.

2. Look for a way to have fun and laugh daily

Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.

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

3. Turn your experience into valuable life lessons

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.

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

4. Focus on a tangible action

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

5. Cheer yourself up by making someone else’s day

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

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

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

The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.

7. Live your day with the end in mind

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

8. Step out of your comfort zone — get out where the wind is blowing

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Reflection Questions

• Which wisdom tip feels like fuel you can use today?

• What will you do differently to stay motivated and committed to positive action?

  *All quotes are from Mark Twain