By Kyle Ohman
BasketballHQ.com

No matter what your occupation is in life you have different things that motivate you. Whether it is working hard to provide for your family or busting your tail because you are trying to achieve something that everyone said you couldn’t do, we all get our motivation from somewhere.

Having played collegiate and professional basketball my background is sports and without having motivation in sports you are not going to go very far. I would even take that one step farther and say without having the right things to motivate you, you will not go very far. This is not just true for sports but in everyday life as well.

In my basketball career I have played with or against hundreds of different players and it is pretty easy to see what motivates each player. Some of the motivations are pure like; wanting to be the best player they can, helping the team win, or having a chance to play at the next level. Others were not as much and might be; make a bunch of money, get all the girls, fame, etc.

I am not here to tell you “good” or “bad” on what motivates you, but I would like to give you 3 tips/warnings when deciding on what you are going to let motivate you.

Long Term Motivation

Too many people don’t have long term motivation. They are only focused on the immediate motivation of getting to the weekend, buying a new toy, or something along those lines. However when that is over it is back to the unmotivated style of life. That is why it is important to have long term goals that are going to keep you motivated and working hard.

Don’t be afraid to set a big goal and let it motivate you. You need something that is going to motivate you every day to want to do better and accomplish more in life. It is going to be something different for every person, so it is up to you to decide.

Don’t Try to Please Everyone

Something that I struggled with when I was younger was trying to please others and make everyone happy, but that is impossible. Nothing you do is going to make every single person happy. So if your motivation is to please everyone then you are always going to feel discouraged because it won’t ever happen.

Your motivation has to be to yourself and doing the best that you can. Stay true to what you believe in and what you are trying to do. After you do that pleasing others will be an added bonus but either way you will know that you stuck by what you believe in and you did your best.

This is where family and friends are really important. No matter what happens or what other people might be saying about you, they know who you are and what kind of person you are. These are the only people that should really matter to you when trying to please others or make people proud of you.

Are You Going to be Satisfied?

There are a lot of successful people in the world that have gotten where they are by being motivated by money, fame, etc. I have no argument there. My question though is this, will those people ever be satisfied? If your motivation is to get as rich as you can then you will always be wanting more and eventually it will consume you.

Fame, people, and money are always going to come and go. Putting your motivation solely in those things will never give you what you are looking for, at least in the long run.

Another big motivation that people use is proving other people wrong. Someone says that you aren’t good enough and that motivates you to work even harder. There is nothing wrong with that but I would be careful on whether you are doing it to prove to yourself that you can or to prove to them that they are wrong, there is a big difference.

There are always going to be people that say you can’t do it, but if you put your motivation in proving them wrong and are always walking around with a chip on your shoulder you are going to become a very negative person that feels like the world is against you. Choose to do something that no one says you can do to prove to yourself that you can do it, that is motivation enough.

Conclusion

Everyone needs to have motivation to have a successful life and each individual person’s motivation is going to be different. It is up to you to decide what you are going to choose to motivate you, and to help you achieve your goals in life. I hope that I have been able to help you in your process of determining what will work for you. In no way am I considered an expert on this matter but I am glad to be able to share some of my life experiences and other life experiences that I have witnessed first hand. I would love to hear your comments and opinions below. Thanks for reading!

BasketballHQ.com

Author Bio
This article was written by Kyle Ohman. Kyle was a thousand point scorer at Liberty University (div. 1), was ranked the 19th best shooter in the country by Fox Sports his senior year. Kyle has also played professionally in Spain. Most recently he coached a high school team that played on a national level and beat the 12th ranked team in the nation. Coach Ohman is the Co-Owner and founder of BasketballHQ.com

For less than a dollar, you can create and maintain motivation and success for yourself and others.

What’s the secret? A mini-notebook.

There are many different sizes available, made by many different companies. I have several that are 4″ x 6″, with 50 sheets. You are probably asking yourself how a small notebook can help you with motivation.

The steps below will explain how so much can be done with so little.

1. THE IDEA
On any given day I may think of 3-5 ideas that I would like to remember for a later time. Without a place to put these ideas, they would be lost in the daily clutter.

Your notebook is the place to write these ideas down. They may be things you have to do during the week, projects that you’d like to start, or just an idea that you need to remember.

2. THE WRITING
When one of these ideas finds its way into your head, it’s time to jot it down. Write down a simple description of the idea in your notebook.

The description should be long enough for you to remember what your idea was, but not too long as to take up too much space and time. After you have several ideas down, you want to be able to remember them quickly and fully.

3. THE ACTION
After you have thought of and written down your ideas, it’s time to put them to use. You can choose a time each day or each week when you go through your list. From this stage you can prioritize, organize, or further develop your ideas. Then you can get start doing them.

Thoughts that pop into your head now have a safe place to go. No longer will great ideas be lost. They will be written down and ready for you, whenever you are ready for them

In a general way, we try to anticipate some of your questions so that I can respond no comment with some degree of knowledge.
~ William Baker

The more our knowledge is extended, the more incompatible does the theory of evolution become with the facts.
~ William Bateson, Address to the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1921)

In communications, familiarity breeds apathy.
~ Bill Bernbach, Bill Bernbach said . . . (1989).

Enthusiastic Admiration is the first Principle of Knowledge and its last.
~ William Blake

General knowledges are those knowledges that idiots possess.
~ William Blake, in Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (1957). Discourse II, annotations to Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses (c. 1808)

The true method of knowledge is experiment.
~ William Blake, All Religions are One (1788)

You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough.
~ William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790-93). Proverbs of Hell

No coach has ever won a game by what he knows; it’s what his players know that counts.
~ Paul William “Bear” Bryant, TowleHouse Publishing Company (March 2000). I Ain’t Never Been Nothing but a Winner: Coach Paul “Bear” Bryant’s 323 Greatest Quotes About Success, On and Off the Football Field

I have long known that it is part of God’s plan for me to spend a little time with each of the most stupid people on earth.
~ Bill Bryson

All knowledge all discoveries belong to everybody. . . . All knowledge all discoveries belong to you by right. It is time to demand what belongs to you.
~ William S. Burroughs, The Job: Interviews With William S. Burroughs (1969). Prisoners of the Earth Come Out

A single hour a day, steadily given to the study of some interesting subject, brings unexpected accumulations of knowledge.
~ William Ellery Channing

It is not the quantity but the quality of knowledge which determines the mind’s dignity.
~ William Ellery Channing

What is mysterious, secret, unknown, cannot at the same time be known as an object of faith.
~ William Ellery Channing, The Complete Works of William Ellery Channing (1884).

We may believe what goes beyond our experience, only when it is inferred from that experience by the assumption that what we do not know is like what we know.
~ William Kingdon (W.K.) Clifford, in Contemporary Review (1877). The Ethics of Belief, III. The Limits Of Inference

Thou god of our idolatry, the press. . . .
Thou fountain, at which drink the good and wise;
Thou ever-bubbling spring of endless lies;
Like Eden’s dread probationary tree,
Knowledge of good and evil is from thee.
~ William Cowper, The Progress of Error (1782).

The sure foundations of the state are laid in knowledge, not in ignorance.
~ George William Curtis

But ask not bodies (doomed to die),
To what abode they go;
Since knowledge is but sorrow’s spy,
It is not safe to know.
~ Sir William Davenant, The Just Italian. Act V, scene i

Information is not knowledge. Let’s not confuse the two.
~ W. Edwards Deming

We do not know what quality is.
~ W. Edwards Deming

You should not ask questions without knowledge.
~ W. Edwards Deming

Knowledge is the eye of desire and can become the pilot of the soul.
~ William James (Will) Durant

Our knowledge is a receding mirage in an expanding desert of ignorance.
~ William James (Will) Durant

Do you remember the Platonic dialog in which Socrates argues the definition of wisdom with Hippocrates? As far as I’m concerned, Hippocrates was the first hippy, a guy who was smug because he thought he knew something. Socrates was wise because he realized how little he knew.
~ Bill Evans, Down Beat Magazine (1960).

I don’t know anything about inspiration because I don’t know what inspiration is; I’ve heard about it, but I never saw it.
~ William Faulkner

I never know what I think about something until I read what I’ve written on it.
~ William Faulkner

Too many of us wait to do the perfect thing, with the result we do nothing. The way to get ahead is to start now. While many of us are waiting until conditions are “just right” before we go ahead, others are stumbling along, fortunately ignorant of the dangers that beset them. By the time we are, in our superior wisdom, decided to make a start, we discover that those who have gone fearlessly on before, have, in their blundering way, traveled a considerable distance. If you start now, you will know a lot next year that you don’t know now, and that you will not know next year, if you wait.
~ William Feather, in The William Feather Magazine

It is the great glory of the quest for human knowledge that, while making some small contribution to that quest, we can also continue to learn and to take pleasure in learning. Fellow students, there will be hard work and heart break in your futures but there will also be stimulating intellectual pleasure and joy. In less pompous language I call it fun.
~ William A. Fowler, Speech at the Nobel Banquet, Stockholm, Sweden (10 December 1983).

“I don’t know” has become “I don’t know yet.”
~ Bill Gates

You need to know about customer feedback that says things should be better.
~ Bill Gates

It used to be easy to know what we wanted for our children, and now the best for our children might mean deciding which ones to kill. We’ve always wanted the best for our grandparents, and now that might mean killing them. We have the awesome knowledge to do these things, and inevitably we shall be forced to act on it.
~ Willard “Will” Gaylin, Address, Conference of the American Association of University Women (17 February 1972).

Nobody knows anything.
~ William Goldman, Warner Books (1983). Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting

Liberty is one of the best of all sublunary advantages. I would willingly therefore communicate knowledge, without infringing, or with as little possible violence to, the volition and individual judgment of the person to be instructed.
~ William Godwin, The Enquirer (1797). Of the Communication of Knowledge

Nothing is more powerful and liberating than knowledge.
~ William H. Gray III

Can Christ be in thy heart, and thou not know it? Can one king be dethroned and another crowned in thy soul, and thou hear no scuffle?
~ William Gurnall

. . . all we know is still infinitely less than all that remains unknown.
~ William Harvey, in The Harvard Classics. 1909-14, On the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Animals (1628). Dedication

. . . there is no perfect knowledge which can be entitled ours, that is innate; none but what has been obtained from experience, or derived in some way from our senses.
~ William Harvey

What is research, but a blind date with knowledge?
~ Will Henry (Henry Wilson Allen)

Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what’s more than enough.
~ Billie Holiday, Lady Sings the Blues (1956, autobiography)

You can always draw as well as you know how to. I flatter myself that I feel more than I express on canvas; but I know that is not so.
~ William Morris Hunt

Baseball men have not yet reached the revelation of Sir Francis Bacon, which was in essence that since all men live in darkness, who believes something is not a test of whether it is true or false. I have spent years trying to get people to ask simple questions: What is the evidence, and what does it mean?
~ Bill James, This Time Let’s Not Eat the Bones (1989).

To know an object is to lead to it through a context which the world provides.
~ William James, The Meaning of Truth (1909).

We keep unaltered as much of our old knowledge, as many of our old prejudices and beliefs, as we can.
~ William James

It wasn’t until quite late in life that I discovered how easy it is to say, “I don’t know.”
~ W. Somerset Maugham

[Psychologists should use their self-knowledge to recall] some devastating conflict of desires, some moral struggle hardly won, some intense pain, some base temptation, some impulse of profound pity or of tender devotion, of fierce anger or horrible fear. Is there not something radically wrong with a system of thought {i.e. behaviourism} which tells us that these experiences are of no account in the world?
~ William McDougall, London : Methuen (1923). An Outline of Psychology

. . . we know
from the beginning that the darkness
is beyond us there is no explaining
the dark it is only the light
that we keep feeling a need to account for.
~ William Stanley (W.S.) Merwin, The Pupil (2001). The Marfa Lights

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he knows something.
~ Wilson Mizner

Better know nothing than half-know many things.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra (1885).

On this earth, one pays dearly for every kind of mastery. . . . For having a specialty one pays by also being the victim of this specialty. But you would have it otherwise — cheaper and fairer and above all more comfortable — isn’t that right, my dear contemporaries?
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882).

The man of knowledge must be able not only to love his enemies but also to hate his friends.
~ Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

When you don’t know that you don’t know, it’s a lot different than when you do know that you don’t know.
~ Bill Parcells

He that has more knowledge than judgment, is made for another man’s use more than his own.
~ William Penn, Fruits of Solitude (1693).

The truest end of life is to know that life never ends.
~ William Penn

I believe a knowledge of the Bible without a college course is more valuable than a college course without a Bible.
~ William Lyon Phelps

Know thyself. A Yale undergraduate left on his door a placard for the janitor on which was written, “Call me at 7 o’clock; it is absolutely necessary that I get up at seven. Make no mistake. Keep knocking until I answer.” Under this he had written: “Try again at ten.”
~ William Lyon Phelps

You shouldn’t speak until you know what you’re talking about. That’s why I get uncomfortable with interviews. Reporters ask me what I feel China should do about Tibet. Who cares what I think China should do? I’m a f—ing actor! They hand me a script. I act. I’m here for entertainment, basically, when you whittle everything away. I’m a grown man who puts on makeup.
~ (William) Brad Pitt, Time (13 October 1997)

Perhaps never before have knowledge, techniques, and methods been so bountiful. Canoes must be paddled harder than ever just to keep up with the knowledge explosion.
~ William Watson Purkey, An Introduction To Invitational Theory

Well, all I know is what I read in the papers.
~ Will Rogers, The New York Times (30 September 1923).

Science is what you know, philosophy is what you don’t know.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell, Quoted by Alan Wood in Simon & Schuster (1958). Bertrand Russell

We know very little, and yet it is astonishing that we know so much, and still more astonishing that so little knowledge can give us so much power.
~ Bertrand Arthur William Russell

The most successful television is done in eight-second thoughts, and the things I know about basketball, motivation and people go deeper than that.
~ William Felton (Bill) Russell (on being a color commentator for televised basketball games), The Sacramento Bee.

Knowing how things work is the basis for appreciation, and is thus a source of civilized delight.
~ William L. Safire

What we don’t need to know for achievement, we need to know for our pleasure.
~ William L. Safire

Whole areas of knowledge and information have been defined into nonexistence because the system cannot know, understand, control, or measure them.
~ Anne Wilson Schaef

Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him, Horatio; a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy.
~ William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Act V, scene i

Go to your bosom:
Knock there, and ask your heart what it doth know.
~ William Shakespeare

I never knew so young a body with so old a head.
~ William Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice

Knowledge is the wing whereby we fly to Heaven.
~ William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part II

O! what men dare do! what men may do! what men daily do, not knowing what they do!
~ William Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing. Act IV, scene i

We know what we are, but know not what we may be.
~ William Shakespeare, Hamlet. Act IV, scene v

His knowledge of books had in some degree diminished his knowledge of the world.
~ William Shenstone

He that would know the Nature of the Water . . . must find out its Source.
~ William Temple, (1673) in Burton Stevenson (1948). The Home Book of Proverbs, Maxims, and Familiar Phrases

Philosophy seeks knowledge for the sake of understanding, while religion seeks knowledge for the sake of worship.
~ William Temple, Nature, Man and God (1934).

I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses.
~ William Makepeace Thackeray

Not in a moment, or an hour, or day
The knowledge comes; the power is far too great,
To win in any desultory way.
No soul is worthy till it learns to wait.
Day after day be patient, then, oh, soul;
Month after month–till, lo! the goal! the goal!
~ Ella Wheeler Wilcox, in New Thought Pastels (1906). Knowledge

It is not necessary to know the origin of the universe; it is necessary to want to know. Civilization depends not on any particular knowledge, but on the disposition to crave knowledge.
~ George F. Will

And the ones that know you so well are the ones that can swallow you whole.
~ Dar Williams, The Ocean

This heart of mine
will never see
what everybody knows
but me.
~ Hank Williams, Sr., You Win Again

Although I may not give up searching out the mystery, I do not want to torture myself to know the unknowable.
~ Philip W. Williams, in Augsbury Fortress WHEN A LOVED ONE DIES (1976), A Defeated Enemy

I hear people of my race say that going there is an awakening experience. They just felt at home and in a connection. I have been desperate to go there and I have an opportunity to feel and see my history. You don’t know yourself until you know your history.
~ Serena Williams (on visiting Africa), Press Conference, Wimbledon, England (24 June 2003).

By the time you know what to do, you’re too old to do it.
~ Theodore Samuel (“Ted”) Williams

I know there has to be a plan even though we might not understand it.
~ Gordon Wilson

If you think you know what the hell is going on, you’re probably full of shit.
~ Robert Anton Wilson

Many are our joys
In youth, but oh! what happiness to live
When every hour brings palpable access
Of knowledge, when all knowledge is delight,
And sorrow is not there!
~ William Wordsworth, The Prelude (1805)

Oh, be wiser thou!
Instructed that true knowledge leads to love.
~ William Wordsworth, Lines left upon a Seat in a Yew-tree (1795)

I have no question:
It is enough, I know what fixed the station
Of star and cloud.
And knowing all, I cry. . . .
~ William Butler Yeats, Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916). The Hour-Glass

I would be — for no knowledge is worth a straw –
Ignorant and wanton as the dawn.
~ William Butler Yeats, The Wild Swans at Coole (1919). The Dawn

It would need a great deal of wisdom to know what it is we want to know.
~ William Butler Yeats, Responsibilities and Other Poems (1916). The Hour-Glass

Nothing we know of the why or the where –
To swamp, or jungle, or wastes of snow –
Nothing we know, and little we care.
~ William Young, Wishmakers’ Town (1885). The Pawns