Dave Kashen explores how founders can shift from motivation rooted in lack and insecurity to what he calls creative tension: accepting where you are now while holding a vision for where you want to go.
So what's going to drive me to do— my whole life I've been motivating myself from a sense of lack, right? I need to be better, like you said. So what's going to motivate me? And they, they really truly get scared. And some people listening might experience that. It's like, if I, if I challenged you as listeners, could you just accept yourself and your life and your startup exactly as it is? You actually feel the, the lack, the tension going away, and it's actually scary because it's like Oh wait, am I going to just lose my motivation? I don't want to be put in neutral. Yeah, I don't want to be in neutral. I don't want to become a lazy couch potato. I don't want to be a monk in a cave. That's not the game I'm playing. And I've had a few clients recently say that specifically. And so, when you at the same time accept reality and accept yourself as reality as it is, yourself as you are, and imagine a desired future state. You generate creative tension. It's a different form of tension that actually, you know, that's the clean fuel in my mind. It actually feels good. It's more like being drawn or pulled from the future than being like pushed or driven away from something that isn't, you know, is a problem or is bad or
