If you are thinking of writing a motivational book, you’ll be doing it mostly for yourself. And perhaps, if you are lucky and your concept appeals to lots of others, this can become a bestseller overnight.

So the keyword here is motivation. How do you get motivated?

Actually, everyone can do this. We are not talking about space science. What most successful coaches and guru’s talk about is keeping a ‘Career’ journal. From this you can generate your motivational book.

Pay a few dollars for nice paper and a cover that inspires you (this journal should not come from Walmart). Then note down all of your career successes and challenges in this journal. From time to time you go back and review it, so that you can see how far you’ve come by now.

What you should write about is the feeling of being on top of the world. Each person has this day – or days – when he or she is feeling wonderful and everything is just perfect. You were fantastic. You could hear, see, taste, touch and feel with every fiber of your being. Describe how it felt, because this is your success.

Writing in the journal should be a privilege. You don’t write in it every day – and you certainly never write down anything negative! This is not a recording of all of your feelings, although of course they will be embedded.

The reason why you should only write about positive things is that later on, when you look back to this journal and read one of your entries (if only for a brief moment), you can feel the same vibrations as you were feeling when you wrote it.

Reading about something that got you going is so much better than reading other motivational stories. It is really priceless to remember how your life is – how talented you are in your chosen field, how well you can play baseball, … It’s about YOU. The best motivator for you is yourself.

We also need to clarify writing about anything negative. What is meant is that you should not write when you are feeling negative. It may be okay to write about feeling great while you have overcome a major obstacle – that’s what we do when we are on top of the world. But it serves no purpose to write down notes to get things ‘off your chest’. It is good that you do that, but they belong in another (personal) journal.

You may think that it will help you to realize that you have done something wrong. On the contrary, it doesn’t make you feel good at all. Once there was an experiment where volunteers were asked to keep a journal for one year. At the end of it, the group was split up. One half was asked to throw their journals away. The other half was asked to go back each day and read the entry for that day the previous year. A large percentage of this last group was later on diagnosed with clinical depression. Interesting, right?