[rckoepke]

For a year or two I had a mantra: "A day is a length of time that no man is rich enough to waste".

It wasn't grammatically/syntactically valid, but it worked well as a token for a concept that helped me immensely those years.

[feanaro]

I guess it depends on your personality. Fear-based tactics don't usually work well on me, they just make me anxious about what I am supposedly going to lose. Once I realize that there is in fact nothing to lose, I can relax and handle things effortlessly.