When it comes to business, there are two types of people: those that do, and those that talk.
No matter how tough you are, at a certain point in your career, you’ll have to face uncomfortable
situations, make big sacrifices, and make painful decisions, all for the sake of your goal.
Today, I’m going to explain to you how to properly motivate yourself, I’ll give you the
difference between fear and love when it comes to motivation, and what you can expect from business.
The Difference Between Love And Fear When it comes to entrepreneurship,
don’t let the lifestyle fool you. If you want to have the options, so better attorneys,
better house, a better car, better vacations, and all that comes with wealth and success,
you must know that it takes a lot of work and sacrifice.
And you need to ask yourself if you’re willing to put in that kind of dedication.
‘Cause here’s the thing: it is easy to start, it is extremely hard to keep going. Especially
nowadays with what the internet makes you believe, you think that business is easy, that you become
profitable in a week, and that you become a millionaire in one year. That’s not the case.
First of all, most businesses fail before they’re even born. Think about how many have started a
podcast, or how many have tried dropshipping. Most people expect to make 10 thousand dollars in 30
days of being in business, then they find out that this isn’t how it works, and they give up.
Second of all, even if they persevere, most business people
won’t put in the work and the dedication necessary to grow businesses. Or,
in the case of successful entrepreneurs, they get comfortable when they make their first success,
they look the other way, and everything collapses because they lose focus.
Business isn’t that fun, it’s a beast that you need to tame, and most of us lack the fuel
necessary to stay focused for long hours. But where does that motivation come from?
Let’s divide it in two big categories, love and fear.
Love is the kind of motivation they would give you as a young person. They would go easy on you,
forgive you on your mistakes and even not hold you accountable. If you know Gary Vee,
he talks a lot about this parenting mistake, which is always saying “yes” to a child.
In the real world, you’ll be refused multiple times, you’ll fail, and you’ll have to stand
back up and keep going. That’s not the image that most young people have of the real world.
They have a false perception of reality because their parents always said yes to them,
and continuously protected them from any mental or physical harm.
Kids and teens need to experience real consequences and be accountable for
their own actions. They can’t always be forgiven, they can’t be too sensitive,
or life will beat them hard when it comes time to man up and face real problems.
Then there’s fear, which is far more motivating than love,
and I’ll explain the reason in a minute.
First, what kind of fear I’m I talking about?
It’s the kind of fear that you feel when you’re running out of money, and you have no choice
but to work hard, otherwise, you might miss your rent payment. The kind of urgency that
you feel when the deadline of a project is tomorrow and you still have a lot to do,
During these times, not only you are more productive, you’re also more focused,
and hardworking, simply because the consequences of not working are much worse than not working.
But there are unpleasant consequences to working for your dreams too, so why do we keep
procrastinating on achieving our goals? The reason is that the consequence isn’t stressful enough.
As humans, every single thing we do, we do for one of two reasons.
Reason number 1: to avoid or solve pain. Think about eating: you eat to solve the pain of being
hungry. Think about buying a lamp: you buy it to solve the pain of not seeing anything at night.
Insurance solves the fear of the pain of having to pay thousands of dollars if something bad happens.
The greater the pain, the greater the motivation.
Reason number 2: to gain pleasure. Think about eating cake:
you’re not hungry, you just enjoy the positive feelings associated with it.
You watch TV because it’s easy to do, it’s fun and entertaining.
Between the two, the first reason is far more motivating than the second one. That’s the main
reason why these salespeople always try to push a problem before asking you to buy.
They do that by asking you a question or by stating something relatable. For example,
if you’re selling a vacuum, you might say “Are you sick and tired of your cat’s fur on your couch?”
Back to fear or love, you can now understand why fear works better than love.
Love doesn’t create urgency, doesn’t stress you out. When you are presented with a problem,
and consequences of doing nothing, you’re going to get stuff done no matter what.
How To Properly Motivate Yourself If you seriously want to become motivated,
you have to work on it. Motivation isn’t something that comes and goes,
you have to be able to motivate yourself. Has this ever happened to you?
You go to a seminar, the guy talks to you about dedication, hard work,
he uses all these quotes to hype you up, and when you get back home all ready to go for it.
Maybe the next day you actually get stuff done, then after a couple of days,
all the fire is lost. That’s why you need to learn how to motivate yourself,
if you don’t you won’t be able to stay focused for long periods of time.
Number 1: Have A Ritual A while ago I first got into
sales and the guy I was working with gave me a copy of the sales script he was using. We’re
talking about high-performance people, these guys would close thousands of dollars on a daily basis.
At the very beginning of the script, there was a little paragraph called “the ritual”. It was
a series of steps the guy would take every time he was about to start a selling session.
He had to call hundreds of people daily, so he needed motivation and drive to do that.
Whatever you do, you need to have a ritual that goes further than your routine.
It has to be something that not only you do before an intense session of whatever work you have to do
but also do when you’re out of motivation and you can’t get yourself to get started or keep going.
Unfortunately, I can’t give you the exact formula for this one, since it’s very
personal and what works for me might not work for you. I’ll give you some examples, you can
combine more of these and create your own ritual. • Fast, intense cardio. 15-20 minutes of running.
• Ice cold shower: cold showers are proven to help big time when you feel unmotivated.
In order to make it easy to go under the cold water, I advise you to use the 3 seconds rule. You
count to three, and then you’re in. Don’t think about it, just go. Also, take a big breath before
you do. The cold water might cut your breath for a couple of seconds. I know it’s uncomfortable, but
the satisfaction that you’ve got something done at the end is priceless. Plus, there are other
scientifically-proven benefits of cold showers. • Watch your favorite motivational videos. This
one takes me back to when I got into sales again. I used to have a list of short scenes
from various movies. I had scenes from The Wolf Of Wall Street, The Boiler Room, and more.
I would watch all that 30 minutes’ worth of material to get myself hyped up.
Number 2: Practice Self-Talk And Keep A Journal
As crazy as it sounds, talking to yourself in the mirror can seriously boost your
confidence. You need to be brutally honest with yourself and state what you need to do next.
Here are some topics you can discuss with yourself:
• Why you’re not getting stuff done, the root of your problem
• What you need to do in order to solve that problem, step by step
• Get heavy thoughts out of the way: if there’s something that you can’t stop thinking about
and is constantly shifting your attention from the work to something unimportant,
the only way to solve this problem is to get the thing out of the way by actually thinking it out.
Also, keep a journal. When it comes to business, you have to think about multiple things at once,
and sometimes you’re forced to multitask, even though I highly recommend avoiding it at all
costs. However, the truth is that there are days when so many weaknesses are exposed at once and
you have no choice but to solve them all, and to avoid burnout, you need to organize your thoughts.
This is a skill that you need to master, so practice makes perfect. Something that really
helps keeping your mind at peace and not racing all the time is keeping a journal and having every
single thing organized in a productivity software. This is something that seriously helped me.
If you ever feel like you have so much stuff to do that you don’t even know where
to get started and you continuously worry about not having your priorities on point,
apps like ClickUp or Trello will help you tremendously. Learn to use them, there are many
options and most are free. I advise you to keep only one app and one physical journal. The journal
is to organize your thoughts, personal stuff, like relationship problems and similar things.
The software is to organize tasks, clients, duties, all that.
And that’s it! If you start dedicating some serious time to strategizing and organizing
your mind you’ll start being 100 percent clear about what needs to be done, in what order, with
what deadline. Also, you now know how to motivate yourself and how to do it in an efficient manner.
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