Motivation Archives – Michael is Amazing

Finding Good Places to Take Photos In An Unfamiliar City

As a photography enthusiast (or professional!), one of the most exciting aspects of travelling to a new city is the opportunity to capture unique and memorable photos. However, finding good places to take photos in an unfamiliar city can be a challenge. On a recent trip to Nottingham, I was struck by how beautiful parts of the city were but ended up coming away without any memorable shots. I know firsthand how annoying this can be as a photographer. Having had time to think about it in more depth, I will, in this post, share my personal experiences and tips for finding great photography spots in an unfamiliar city.

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Should Creatives Sellout? Moving Past the Starving Artist Romanticism

Is there a more romanticised scene than that of the “starving artist” persona? The struggling artist who moved to the big city with hopes of making it big. Whether the painter in Paris or the actor in Los Angeles, there is an idealised view of these creatives and their lifestyle whilst striving to prove themselves to the community of artists and the wider public. Cries of “sellout” abound when that same artist receives not just a level of success, but more importantly payment in return for that success. So, should creatives sellout? Let us look past the romanticism of the “starving artist” role and see.

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What Are Photography Projects and How Can They Help You?

I often wonder about the progress of my photography skills and how I can improve. Aside from just reading material and trying new things when I go out and about shooting, I have found that having a photography project can fast track my skill growth whilst being a rewarding experience. You might have already read my previous post about hobby projects and using them to stay motivated (if not, be sure to go read that too once you are done here!) but photography projects can be a little different. So, what are photography projects and how can they help you?

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Can 30 Continuous Days of Exercise Make a Difference?

The benefits of regular exercise are often regarded highly when discussing fitness, weight management, dieting, and lifestyles. You can benefit from improvement in many areas of your life by committing to regular exercise. Aside from the usual changes in your body, you can also often the changes in other areas such as motivation, concentration, and productivity to name a few. but what would happen if you went beyond doing regular exercise and instead did exercise every single day? Can 30 continuous days of exercise make a difference?

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Getting Back on Track: Fitness & Weight Loss

This year has not been good for the fitness side of my life. At least, not yet it hasn’t. The Coronavirus caused gyms to shut and bad habits to be formed whilst working from home – if you were lucky enough to be able to. For many people, this has meant that waistlines have expanded as exercise levels plummet. I am certainly one of those people. In the past few weeks, I’ve been trying to get a greater handle on my fitness now that the gyms have reopened. This will be a short post about what I’m up to and what I hope to achieve with my fitness and weight loss journey.

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Can Hobby Projects keep you motivated all year?

When thinking about goals and resolutions for the new year you might be reminded of all of the times you didn’t quite make it. All the times you started a new hobby, started doing something repetitively, just to end up stopping after a while due to burning out or mere forgetfulness. When thinking about these times that things didn’t go so well, you might stop to think about how you could improve in the future. How next time can be different. Luckily for you, I have the solution. You can keep up with a new hobby by adding some structure to it and setting some hobby projects for yourself to work on.

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How to be Successful with your 2020 Goals (& 2019 Goal Roundup)

As is ever the case, the year of 2019 seemed to fly by! I know that in my own life so much happened last year, and I’m sure you have had a lot happen to you too. Hopefully what happened to you fell in line with what you wanted to happen in 2019. Your goals, aspirations, and Resolutions for the year. I know mine did (for the most part!) and, hopefully, you also had a successful year of getting things done! In this post, I will talk about why goals are important and how I stay motivated with my goals. I’ll do a Roundup of how my 2019 goals went (original 2019 goal post here) and what I have planned for 2020. I’ll also discuss how I plan to keep and achieve these goals and some tips you can apply in your own life!

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Strong Foundation: ensuring a resilient starting point for your goals

When I think back to all of the times I have failed to reach my goals, targets, and ambitions – and there are many such occasions – I can see one reoccurring problem. The lack of a strong foundation from which to springboard to achievement. Often we embark upon a task without first doing the necessary groundwork in order to increase our chances of success. It is these tasks which fail 9 out of 10 times. What we must do is learn, gather information, and perform prerequisite tasks to provide the strong foundations we can then lean on to reach our goals.

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5 tips to overcome your fear of failure

When talking about goals, about dreams, and about life, it is easy to feel a bit daunted. It is often viewed as easy to give up on a goal in favour of maintaining the status quo simply because we worry about the cost of failure. Over our life, this worry slowly develops into a fear. Partly due to it being normalised in our society to fear failure, but also because we remember how it feels to fail.

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Making way for the Christmas goodies – ditching the excess, unwanted, and unused from your life.

We all love Christmas but an inevitable side effect is that we end up with even more stuff! From clothes to trivia games to the latest hobby aid it all takes up space. I tried to pre-empt it this year by throwing a few things out over the past week before the big day. Although admittedly when it came to the clothes I only just got around to ditching the excess.

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Sometimes I ask myself – why can’t I maintain a fitness routine?

The first time I began to workout was at university, first year. I had ordered a 20kg set of dumbbells from the internet. So weak was I at this time that I struggled to carry the box containing them from the faculty office where they were delivered to my hall of residence. It wasn’t a far distance but I still had to put it down twice on the way.

Things have changed but I am still quite far from where I wanted to be some 9 years later.

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