Typically, motivation is a lot like blowing up a balloon. You blow up the balloon and without tying the end, you let it go and it flies all over the room bouncing against everything.

While it is great to have a balloon all blown up to play with, to really enjoy it you have to tie off the end so you can really have some fun with it. You can use it like a ball, or rub it on your head and let the static electricity stick it to the wall. Or you can tie a string to it and anchor it to something and bat it around. Without tying off the end you have the frustration of just blowing it up over and over and over again until it finally blows out the window or pops. While that is fun to do for a few minutes, it be¬comes tiring pretty quickly.

Watch people who have just become all fired up and motivated, but they have not been given any direction. They are like the balloon that has been blown up but not tied. They bounce around the room letting out lots of motivational hot air, passing out their “Attitude is Everything” buttons and getting in everyone’s way. Yeah, they know all the buzzwords and can quote the jargon, but they have no direc¬tion. And just like the balloon, they become tiring after a while.

I watched my son, Tyler, graduate from basic training in the Army. After the ceremony when they were doing their yells and cheers and all that Army stuff, one of the sergeants yelled out, “Are you motivated?” At this point the soldiers all yelled in unison, “Moti¬vated, motivated, down-right motivated, you check us out, you check us out!” When I asked Tyler about that, he said they all yelled that out at the beginning of any task, assignment, or exercise. Now what is crit¬ical to understand is that they already knew the assignment, the task, or the exercise inside and out before they started yelling about how motivated they were. To yell about being motivated with no clue about the task would have been stupid. Why get motivated without a plan? They had a plan, they knew how to do it, and then they got mo¬tivated to accomplish it.

Can you see that is the way it should be done? You must have the plan first. To get motivated without a plan is stupid. You are nothing more but a balloon full of hot air.

I believe you must have direction: plans, dreams, desires, a pic¬ture of what you want, how much you want, who you want, and how you want it to be. You do not need pages of plans; you just need a di¬rection that can be articulated and focused on so you can direct your energy toward it.