The trick to keeping your motivation up through low points and exhausted periods, traveler Marie Stein insists, isn't any particular productivity technique or energy-boosting idea; rather, it's being really, really clear about why you're doing what you doing.

"There is only one way for me to motivate myself to work hard: I don't think about it as hard work. I think about it as part of making myself into who I want to be," she writes. "The 'hard' part for me is choosing and accepting what it is that I have to do... Once I've made the choice to do something, I try not to think so much about how difficult or frustrating or impossible that might be; I just think about how good it must feel to be that, or how proud I might be to have done that."

Struggling to keep your focus on that end vision? "Just ask yourself: If you were the person that you want to be, then what would that person do?" suggests student Karl Bradley Saclolo.