NeoDialectic
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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. After all, 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. Am I right, or am I right?
I’ve analyzed this motivation 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 masquerading as a motivation issue. I think this can definitionally be 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 talking about changing values only opens up Pandora's Box
Are you just not smart or lucky enough? 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 with this? Either dedicate years of your life into becoming a world class 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 in the field? 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 here to ask how to become a doctor. You want to build a business or make money and you want to do it today.
What about just cold hard discipline? Fair enough. If you just had the discipline to stick to your game plan then you would finally reach the promise land. I'll pick discipline over motivation any day! 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? Do you even have the discipline to do a few of the hard tasks you know need to be done? If you had the extraordinary discipline or will already built up, you wouldn’t be asking 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 are harder than the motivational problem you are trying to solve. You may be able to 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. It's @fastlane_dad and I's slang for having your mindset, goals, thoughts, Identity and lifestyle aligned with the goals you are espousing. The closer you are to being ’bout that life, the less being motivation matters. A bee doesn't need to have motivation to make honey. It just does what it naturally wants to do and the end result is honey.
Have you tried the slow and steady route? Have you tried the top 10 tips from your favorite book on motivation, ADHD, focus, and business? Tried all the mind hacks and accessories recommended by your favorite gurus? Still nothing?
Maybe what you need to do is a few week ‘Bout That Life bootcamp. Motivation and action has a certain momentum to it that is hard to describe. The first step is the hardest. The next step is hard, but a little easier. Then you notice that your passing other runners and start liking it. Next thing you know and your not walking. You're running.
During your bootcamp period, you will try to get as close to 100% ’bout that life as you can. This is an attempt to hard reset your habits, thoughts, and environment to get them going in the right direction to achieve your goals.
Being 100% ’bout that life means being 100% immersed in your goal of starting a business or making money (or whatever your definition of success is.) Every single facet of your life will now temporarily revolve 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 'bout that life isn’t asking you to drop all your interests for 12 years. A few week commitment doesn’t sound too bad right?
Unlike the other lenses, there is a clear answer and prescription here. The good olé fake it to you make it. For this time period you commit to not do anything on the pleasure/interest/work side of your life, unless it relates to money or your business. Don’t talk to your friends that aren’t interested in business. 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 or in other places. 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 forums that pertain to business. Like watching movies and youtubing? You can keep watching things, but they better be about making money. Like reading? It better be a book on business. 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 after all. You should hopefully have some kind of predisposition to enjoying the topic of money/business/success. It may still sound like it will be difficult to set aside your current hobbies and interests just for one, but that 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. 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 begin to melt away for the same reason that habits are hardest to break for the first two weeks. This is where it becomes self reinforcing.
It is hard to portray the exact feelings you have once you successfully become 'bout that life. However the first thing you will notice is 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.
Something to keep in mind is that you should always keep one very important word in your head the entire time. ACTION. Ideally you should always be producing/doing as you have likely consumed enough. So try to always tie your consumption with a required action. Thats the deal. It's likely what you will start wanting to do anyways, as alll you are thinking about is business. There is only so long you can watch someone else play a video game before you want to get your hands on the remote. But sometimes you need to kickstart it a bit. Watched a youtube on google ads? Open an account. Read a few threads on TMF forums? Implement one of the recommendations Today.
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. You aren't just leeching from these forums anymore. You are a part of them and they are your community! These are your people! 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.
That's it guys. Let me know your thoughts on whether you'd consider doing something like this. Would you be willing to give it your all for a few days, weeks, months? I know that during the most productive times of my life, business was given nearly 100% of my attention. I didn't need motivation as it's almost all I did and thought about during these periods of focus, so there as nothing left for me to do but business. That's where you want to be to make some serious strides.
I am also curious to hear about your guys motivational issues and roadblocks. What have you tried to do to overcome them? Did it work out? If not, why do you think it didn't work out?
Now go out and get it!
I’ve analyzed this motivation 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 masquerading as a motivation issue. I think this can definitionally be 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 talking about changing values only opens up Pandora's Box
Are you just not smart or lucky enough? 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 with this? Either dedicate years of your life into becoming a world class 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 in the field? 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 here to ask how to become a doctor. You want to build a business or make money and you want to do it today.
What about just cold hard discipline? Fair enough. If you just had the discipline to stick to your game plan then you would finally reach the promise land. I'll pick discipline over motivation any day! 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? Do you even have the discipline to do a few of the hard tasks you know need to be done? If you had the extraordinary discipline or will already built up, you wouldn’t be asking 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 are harder than the motivational problem you are trying to solve. You may be able to 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. It's @fastlane_dad and I's slang for having your mindset, goals, thoughts, Identity and lifestyle aligned with the goals you are espousing. The closer you are to being ’bout that life, the less being motivation matters. A bee doesn't need to have motivation to make honey. It just does what it naturally wants to do and the end result is honey.
Have you tried the slow and steady route? Have you tried the top 10 tips from your favorite book on motivation, ADHD, focus, and business? Tried all the mind hacks and accessories recommended by your favorite gurus? Still nothing?
Maybe what you need to do is a few week ‘Bout That Life bootcamp. Motivation and action has a certain momentum to it that is hard to describe. The first step is the hardest. The next step is hard, but a little easier. Then you notice that your passing other runners and start liking it. Next thing you know and your not walking. You're running.
During your bootcamp period, you will try to get as close to 100% ’bout that life as you can. This is an attempt to hard reset your habits, thoughts, and environment to get them going in the right direction to achieve your goals.
Being 100% ’bout that life means being 100% immersed in your goal of starting a business or making money (or whatever your definition of success is.) Every single facet of your life will now temporarily revolve 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 'bout that life isn’t asking you to drop all your interests for 12 years. A few week commitment doesn’t sound too bad right?
Unlike the other lenses, there is a clear answer and prescription here. The good olé fake it to you make it. For this time period you commit to not do anything on the pleasure/interest/work side of your life, unless it relates to money or your business. Don’t talk to your friends that aren’t interested in business. 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 or in other places. 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 forums that pertain to business. Like watching movies and youtubing? You can keep watching things, but they better be about making money. Like reading? It better be a book on business. 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 after all. You should hopefully have some kind of predisposition to enjoying the topic of money/business/success. It may still sound like it will be difficult to set aside your current hobbies and interests just for one, but that 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. 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 begin to melt away for the same reason that habits are hardest to break for the first two weeks. This is where it becomes self reinforcing.
It is hard to portray the exact feelings you have once you successfully become 'bout that life. However the first thing you will notice is 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.
Something to keep in mind is that you should always keep one very important word in your head the entire time. ACTION. Ideally you should always be producing/doing as you have likely consumed enough. So try to always tie your consumption with a required action. Thats the deal. It's likely what you will start wanting to do anyways, as alll you are thinking about is business. There is only so long you can watch someone else play a video game before you want to get your hands on the remote. But sometimes you need to kickstart it a bit. Watched a youtube on google ads? Open an account. Read a few threads on TMF forums? Implement one of the recommendations Today.
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. You aren't just leeching from these forums anymore. You are a part of them and they are your community! These are your people! 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.
That's it guys. Let me know your thoughts on whether you'd consider doing something like this. Would you be willing to give it your all for a few days, weeks, months? I know that during the most productive times of my life, business was given nearly 100% of my attention. I didn't need motivation as it's almost all I did and thought about during these periods of focus, so there as nothing left for me to do but business. That's where you want to be to make some serious strides.
I am also curious to hear about your guys motivational issues and roadblocks. What have you tried to do to overcome them? Did it work out? If not, why do you think it didn't work out?
Now go out and get it!
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