Entrepreneurship is a full-contact sport.
You need a lot of warming up and permanently train for strength and stamina. Unfortunately, not everyone fights fair, so blows below the belt will be dealt.
Get knocked down seven times, crawl back up eight times.
Motivating people is hard. Increasingly harder, it seems. Getting people to perform a desired action not only takes a variety of skills, providing incentives can be an expensive enterprise.
Improving your product or service, making it easier to understand and use, is significantly cheaper than increasing your customers’ motivation.
Choose wisely.
Trying to impress someone has very little to do with you. It has almost everything to do with the actual person you’re trying to impress. Maybe the person is easy to impress, or quite the opposite? Perhaps they’re having a bad day? Chasing values that you have no control over at all is generally not the best idea.
Like Ernest Hemingway once said: “There is nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.”
If you must impress someone, impress yourself.
Who motivates you? When you have no team leader or superior. At the end of a long day, when everybody went home (or logged off)… In an economic downturn when new business and customers are hard to come by… Who will it be?
You. Only you.
In all fairness, luckily, it’s not always just you. Some of us are blessed with the absolute best partners in this universe.
Still, for you to motivate yourself, you have to know exactly what motivates you. Once established, you have to know what provides you with the energy to start motivating yourself.
Be good to you.
Fifteen years ago, I was about to leave the country for work, without knowing when I’d be back. In the last week before my departure, I met up with a friend. He told me: “I could never do what you do. There are too many things for me here to leave behind”. I always assumed he didn’t mean to imply that I had very little to leave behind.
Muslims fasting for Ramadan often get asked: “so, not even water?” After confirmation that water is indeed excluded, the follow-up statement usually goes something like this. “Whoa, I could never do that.”
Of course, you could. You can leave everything behind, start all over, abstain from food and drinks during the day for a month. Overcome trauma. Heck, you might even be able to move a mountain.
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation, It’s also the cause of it — Mark Manson.
With enough intrinsic motivation, there is nothing we can’t do.