Lack of motivation is one of the biggest gripes I hear from people that are struggling to make entrepreneurship work. For the longest time, I didn’t know what to say to them to help. Afterall, during a big portion of my career I had motivational issues myself! Everywhere you look there is some public speaker or social media influencer that is ready to talk you up to give you motivation. But we all know that doesn’t work longer than 2 minutes. We read their little motivational blurb and feel ready to succeed until the phone rings and we are onto the next thing.
I’ve analyzed this motivational failure problem from every direction and nothing has seemed to click. One point of view is that your lack of motivation just shows that you don’t want it bad enough. Simple as that. It’s really just a Values issue <INSERT ARTICLE ON VALUES>. I think this is definitionally true, but it is kind of neither here nor there. OK, now that I know it’s not important enough, now what? There is no intuitive prescriptions as changing values can be a tougher case to crack than figuring out motivation.
Are you just not smart enough? <INSERT ARTICLE ON WHAT IS INTELLEGENCE> I mean, if you just knew how to do X, Y, Z you wouldn’t need to have the commitment needed to make your business successful. Honey doesn’t have to sell itself to bears. No one would have trouble selling the cure to cancer. Sure, this is all true. So what do you do now? Either dedicated years of your life becoming an expert or be born with more intelligence than you have now, duh! Hey, atleast there is a prescription in there. Are you ready to invest 12 years of your life just to become a mediocre doctor and then another 15 to become an expert? Then when you finally reach this pinnacle, you finally may not need the motivation to start your business. People will pay you for your expertise. But you didn’t come to this blog to ask how to become a doctor. You want to make money and you want to do it soon.
What about just cold hard discipline? Fair enough. If you just had the discipline to stick to your game plan <INSERT ARTICLE ON SETTING GOALS> then you would finally reach the promise land. But now what are you going to do with this information? Do you have the discipline to force yourself to work on your business every day? If you had the discipline or will already, you wouldn’t be asking me about motivation!
The problem is all these lenses of analysis may be true, but they all describe a failure in something inherent to the individual or a commitment that is so long and deep that the requirements needed to do it is harder than the motivational problem you are trying to solve. You may be able to change your Values and improve your discipline through time, but you are now embarking on a completely separate and difficult path than your initial goal.
This is where being ‘Bout That Life™ comes in. The closer you are to being ’bout that life, the less being motivated matters and doing what needs to be done to be successful comes naturally. Have you tried the slow and steady route and it doesn’t work? Maybe you need to do the ‘Bout That Life 3 week bootcamp to hard reset your habits and get your thoughts going in the right direction. In the bootcamp you will try to get as close to 100% ’bout that life as you can.
Being 100% ’bout that life means being 100% immersed in your goal of making money (or whatever your definition of success is. Every single facet of your life revolves around your goal. The beautiful part is unlike the other lenses and commitments, this one can be done with a small commitment and becomes self reinforcing. Being about that life isn’t asking you to drop all your interests for 12 years. A few week commitment doesn’t sound too bad right? <INSERT ARTICLE ON ONE FOOT IN FRONT OF THE OTHER>.
Unlike the other lenses, there is a clear answer and prescription here. The good olé fake it to you make it <INSERT STUDY OR FOOTNOTE ON SMILING MAKES YOU HAPPIER>. For those weeks you commit to not do anything, on the pleasure/interest/work side of your life, unless it relate to money or your business. Don’t talk to your friends that aren’t interested in money. Make an active effort to talk to your go getter friends or that one friend that is always working on something. Don’t have any? Make them virtually on forums. Speaking of forums. Like sitting on forums for your hobbies like cars/watches/video games/etc? No more. The only forums you know now are warrior forums, SEOChat, Wicked Forums, or other forums that pertain to your business. Like watching movies and youtubing? You can keep watching things, but they better be about making money. If you have to watch something on Friday night with your significant other, it should be something like the Wolf of Wallstreet versus Lord of The Rings.
Thinking about money/success may sound miserable to many people, but those people aren’t you. That is why you are here afterall. You should hopefully have some kind of predisposal to enjoying the topic of money or success. It may still sound like it will be difficult to set aside your current hobbies and interests just for one. This is the great part about fake it till you make it. It may feel silly at first and you may yearn for your other hobbies. But then gradually, within a week or two, you will find that focusing all your interest on success makes you more interested in success. Your drive to do old habits and hobbies beings to melt away for the same reason that habits are hardest to break for the first two weeks <INSERT ARTICLE ON STARTING NEW HABITS> This is where it becomes self reinforcing.
It is hard to portray the exact feelings you have once you successfully become about that life. However the first thing you will notice that you don’t need any more motivation to work on your business than you would need to take an extra bite of cheesecake. Working on your business is the easy thing to do. Your brain is now successfully on one track and not working on your success becomes painful. Everyone you talk to on the phone and in person is getting theirs. Everyone you encounter online (forums/youtube/etc) is talking about making money. Every door you open primes your brain into applying itself towards becoming successful. You don’t need to try to have or change your discipline/smarts/motivation/values. They just naturally change.
The point of this drastic change is to kick you out of your motivational rut that you have been in. You can’t necessarily keep up with this level of focus and you shouldn’t have to. The best solutions are ones that make long term changes and not short term binges. But just like Rehab or the Military’s Bootcamp, sometimes you need to have only one option to get your focus set correctly. Then you take what you learned and the progress you made in the weeks and apply it to the rest of your life. You take the new relationship you fostered with your friend that loves to talk business, and you add him to the weekly call schedule. You are now more plugged into the money making forums and maybe you replace 20 minutes of your ESPN watch time with perusing the forums. The goal is to ultimately foster habits that make becoming successful something you do naturally versus something that you have to will yourself into doing.