Or, how come I can't get the motivation to go to the gym or to eat healthy or simply to work hard at school or at my job?

What is it that all these other motivated people know that I don't know?

Well, you're about to learn their secret.

I want you to imagine that you are an old man who's on his deathbed.

There are nurses around you, doctors around you, your family is around you, and everyone is looking right at you.

Your son walks up to you with tears in his face and says: "Dad do you have any regrets in your life?"

You turn your head away from him, look up at the ceiling, and then you start to feel this weird, visceral feeling in your stomach.

It starts to swirl around and it quickly spreads to your entire body.

Then suddenly the entire room turns black and your life begins to flash before your eyes.

You see your childhood bully, your first kiss, the day you got married, you even see your son walking off to college for the first time.

But then, you start to remember all the things that you wished you had done more of in your life, and all the places that you wished you had gone to see, and all the time you wasted doing pointless things.

You start hearing questions like: "What if I had traveled around Europe like I always wanted to?"

"How different would I have felt if I had worked out and got that body that I always wanted?"

"What if I had asked out that really cute girl back in college?"

"What if I had quit my job and started my own business?"

What if.

Those two words are the seeds that grow into the poisonous plant called "regret."

And having regret inside you when you are on your deathbed is a very scary thought to me.

The only way to make sure this doesn't happen is to live your life like a boat floating at sea.

Most people will tell you that stuff like work ethic, self-discipline, goal-setting are the keys to getting what you want in life.

But this is only partly true.

Stuff like that are the things that make the boat move, like having a strong sail or having a good steering wheel.

But having a fully functional boat that can go over any wave, overcome any obstacle that can withstand any storm is totally pointless if you do not have a clear destination of where you want to go.

Now some people think they know where they want to go.

And they might tell you that they wanna end up somewhere with a high-paying job, with a family and a big house, and they wanna drive around in nice cars.

But a lot of the time that life that they're describing is not their own life.

It's the life that their parents want for them.

It's a life that their friends want for them.

It's a life that the movies and social media tells us that we should want to have.

But what is even worse than choosing a life that is not your own, is settling on a life.

Because living that "okay" life is a lot easier than really going after what you want.

If you don't want to die with that horrible feeling of regret, you need to figure out exactly what you want to do, and the only way to do this is to become incredibly self-aware.

If you want to go live up in the mountains and make wooden birdhouses forever, then do it.

If you want to drive around in that Maserati and have that big house, then do it.

There really is no right and wrong answer here, but you have to figure this out for yourself.

But the really hard part about doing all of this is that you have to stop caring what other people and what society thinks of you.

If you were raised in a very quote-unquote "regular" household where your parents worked a normal nine to five job, it's really, really hard to tell them that you want to do something that's totally different, that goes against what they want for you and what everyone else expects for you.

But you cannot let this fear stop you, because life is too short not to stay true to yourself.

But, if you find yourself having trouble staying motivated, just remember this one, poisonous word: regret.

Imagine that you're on your deathbed, and then thinking to yourself, there's so much more I wished I would have done with my life.

There's so much that I would do over again, but now I, I have no energy, and there's just nothing I can do.

There's so much that I regret.

It doesn't matter what your gender is, how tall you are, what you look like, how smart you are, none of that matters.

The only thing that matters is having a desire within you to get what you want, and it's never too late to start on this journey.