“Who Moved My Cheese?” and Other Recommended Books

March 24, 2013

If we are down or nostalgic, have temporarily lost our sense of purpose and want to bring meaning back to our lives, then the best thing is to just stay quiet for a while. So often, we want to make the wheels keep going, so we keep pressing the gas, and then the engine overheats and explodes. Sometimes, we have to stop the car, turn off the engine, let it rest, and start it again later. That’s the way it is with so many things in life.

Before we start the engine running again, reading motivational books can certainly empower us for a while, but we should still get to work and work towards fighting and striving toward more powerful and positive versions of ourselves. Reading motivational books by themselves can only be another tool we take from our tool box of things to use when we are down or blue. This tool box contains things we do, like going for a walk or calling a friend for coffee. All these are like the types of food that, when you eat them now, in another few hours, you feel hungry again. Even though this tool box is filled with tools that are positive things we can do while walking on the path of being whole again, they are temporary and cannot make us whole on their own.

Motivational books are a booster for positivity when we need it. Hearing words of advice from people who have already experienced the same familiar situations as ours and the fact that they have put their minds into researching these situations and letting us actually learn from their experiences is as though we are lost and driving around and then stopped at a gas station to ask for directions. I think of these books as useful tools, such as a road map or GPS.

We were always told that books are our friends. In these kind of situations, they really are, for they really can enhance our states of mind with their power of words. They really can dull our pain temporarily, and they really can block our minds as to not let the negativity come in and replace it with the positive, sort of like an aspirin soothes the pain until the pain completely disappears.