Anthony Burgess was forty years old when he learned he had a brain tumor that, he was told, would kill him within a year. At the time he had no money at all, and nothing to leave his wife Lynne, who would soon be a widow.

Burgess had never been a professional novelist, but he had always known there was a writer inside him. So, simply to leave his wife at least the royalties from a book, he rolled a sheet of paper into his typewriter and began his first novel. There was no guarantee that what he wrote would ever be published, but he could think of nothing else to do.

“It was January 1960,” he said, “and by the diagnosis I had a winter, a spring, and a summer left to live. By the time the leaves began to fall that year, I would be dead.” Working at a feverish pace, Burgess managed to write five and a half novels before the year was out — about as much as E. M. Forster wrote in nearly an entire lifetime, and twice what one of America’s greatest writers, J. D. Salinger, produced in all his years.

But Burgess did not die. The cancer first receded, then disappeared altogether. In a long and full writing life he produced more than seventy works, the most famous of them A Clockwork Orange. Had the death sentence of that cancer never been pronounced, he might never have written a single one of those novels.

Most of us are like Anthony Burgess: we carry within us a great talent that simply waits for some outside emergency to force it into the open.

A useful exercise in self-motivation is to ask yourself what you would do if, like Burgess, you learned you had only a year to live. “If I knew I had just one more year, what would I change in my life, and how would I spend that final year? What, exactly, would I do?” Picturing the shortness of life is a valuable exercise; it often awakens surprising thoughts that bring to the surface the talents you are not yet using.

— Steve Chandler, “100 Ways to Motivate Yourself”