Motivation Cards
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The School of Life Motivation Cards is a toolkit for increasing effectiveness; 52 exercises designed to train your brain to find their bearings and generate their very best efforts.
Good work involves feeling engaged and motivated by what we’re doing – and battling inertia and weariness with courage and imagination....
The School of Life Motivation Cards is a toolkit for increasing effectiveness; 52 exercises designed to train your brain to find their bearings and generate their very best efforts.
Good work involves feeling engaged and motivated by what we’re doing – and battling inertia and weariness with courage and imagination. Fortunately, motivation is not a gift from the gods; it is a quality we can nurture in ourselves and encourage in others. Our minds are not machines, and are prone to distractions, indecision and cognitive biases – but these can also be worked around and overcome.
Each exercise prompts us to engage in activities and thought experiments that help us to surmount mental blocks and formulate strategies for solving problems and achieving our goals. At once a collection of psychological solutions and calls to action, this is an invaluable resource for unlocking our true potential.
How to Use the Cards
1. Select an exercise from one of three categories: Effectiveness, Decisiveness and Objectivity.
2. Follow the instructions and complete the exercise, either alone or as part of a group.
3. Reconsider your work with new purpose in the light of what has been learnt.
Example Cards
Magic Hour
In cinematography, the ‘magic hour’ is the hour just before sunrise or after sunset, when the conditions are perfect for film-making. Most of us have our own ‘magic hour’ – a particular time of day when we are at our most efficient and productive. Thinking over your usual working routine, try to work out when your own ‘magic hour’ is. By scheduling your most important tasks during this time, you can best benefit from your own most productive moments.
Shower Thoughts
It’s a peculiar phenomenon that our best ideas tend to come to us in the shower. There’s a good reason for this. Most mental blocks are the product of anxiety, when our everyday worries about our work oppress our minds and prevent us from thinking freely. But when we’re in the shower – engaged in a task wholly unrelated to work – our anxiety lifts, allowing the kind of unrestricted thinking we’d normally suppress. Whenever you’re stuck for a way forward, take a shower (or go for a walk, make a cup or tea, or have a stretch). This is the opposite of procrastination: through alleviating your everyday anxiety, you’re unlocking your latent brainpower.
Details
Counts 52 cards
Measures 15.5 x 11.5 x 3.5 cm
The School of Life at Misc-store Amsterdam
At Misc-store we carry three Writing as Therapy Journals: Journeys, Night Thoughts and Projects. We also carry their prompt cards for confidence, self knowledge and even career crisis, and we love their books on Small Pleasures.
The School of Life is devoted to developing emotional intelligence through the help of culture. We address such issues as how to find fulfilling work, how to master the art of relationships, how to understand one’s past, how to achieve calm and how better to understand, and where necessary change, the world.
We love The School of Life because their items make a great gift for ourselves and others. Back in 2013 we started with a range of The School of Life items in store, and we are so happy that we can extend our range with all their new items, focusing on the job we have, appreciating small pleasures and the things that might go unnoticed.
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About The School of Life
Alain de Botton founded The School of Life in 2008. His aim was to make philosophy — long seen as the inaccessible, inauthentic stuff of academies and archives — a functional aspect of modern life. The care with which ancient philosophers thought about their lives remains a valuable antidote to the generalised anxiety of our era.
The school thus posits that ideas of Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics are as relevant to us today as they were in ancient Greece. Even if Epicurus never had social media burnout, understanding his thinking can lead us to a healthier relationship with , for example, our phones — and by extension, with one another.
We began stocking The School of Life’s series on work, gratitude and pleasure as a way of thinking through modern day issues. We admire their series for the capacity to stimulate reflection, and their ability to give a new perspective on age old problems. At its core, it is a set of strategies for finding meaning in the modern world — so that we can appreciate small pleasures and the things that might go unnoticed.