YOU Can Boost Motivation INSTANTLY | Stephen Reveals Winning Strategies

All right, everybody. Welcome to another YouTube Hangout. Super excited to be back here with you. I have a new guest to the channel. His name is Steven Rowe. He runs a website called Thoughtful Growth. And he reached out to me and he wanted to get my tips on motivation. He's doing this mashup of all these experts sharing their tips. And I said, I'd be happy to, but how about we do it as a YouTube video so my audience can learn about you and also hear the discussion. So that's what we're going to talk about in the next 30 minutes. Stephen, welcome aboard, man.

Hey, it's great to be here. I'm super excited. Lots of motivation tips.

Stephen's also standing up, so we got our standing up vibe happening today as we're doing this interview. Before we get into the interview and your questions, just a quick overview of Thoughtful Growth, what's happening, what it's about, when it's launching, all that stuff.

Yeah.

Thoughtful Growth.

So I am launching Thoughtful Growth November 1st. Super excited about it. And people kept asking me, like, I didn't used to be an internet entrepreneur and people came to me with help for goals and stuff. And I decided, you know what, to put it online to help people in that way. So it's launching November 1st. I help people reach their goals using data. Super excited. And yeah, the big, the big thing that I'm doing is this post. I've got over 175, I think I'm at 186 different experts are chiming in so far.

Wow, that's a huge one, man.

It's big, it's very big.

I like it. So that's going to be your first post that goes up on the site?

First post that's up on the site, yes sir.

November 1st?

November 1st, Tuesday.

So yeah, that's dropping soon. Yeah, I'm just looking at the calendar. It's— yeah, cool, man. All right, so let's do it. Let's get into it. What do we— let's hit me. What are we talking about? Okay. All right.

We're talking about motivation. So I built up a subscriber base and I've been asking them, you know, what do you guys, what do you guys want to know? What, you know, as far as this idea of personal growth, goals, data analysis, what is important to you? And pretty much everyone that's responded says, you know, the biggest thing for me is motivation. I can't get motivated. You know, I wake up Monday morning and maybe I'm an entrepreneur and I work from home and I get up and you know, I'll just check Facebook. Or maybe you're not an internet entrepreneur or anything and you just, you know, it's Wednesday afternoon, what am I gonna do? I don't feel like moving. So I thought I'd go see the expert. So my first question for you, and the main question and the main topic of our discussion, is the same one I asked you earlier, and that is your 3 top tips for motivation when you feel lazy.

All right, well, before I get to that, I have to shout out to Zeno in the live chat who's hashtagging #StandingSteven. So I like it. Hashtag standing seat. We're going to get trending in the chat. So for me, the first thing that I think is most important to sustained motivation is you have to, you have to have a passion for what you're doing. You have to have a strong why. You have to love what you're doing. I'm sure you're going to get that consistently from a lot of people, from the 180 whatever people who end up doing this, because you can only force yourself to do something for so long. Before you quit. If your goal is I want to buy a Ferrari or I want to travel the world or whatever it is and you're just trying to make money, but you have to do all this crappy stuff that you hate to get there, you're going to quit on it. You're going to quit on that goal because you need to enjoy the process just as much as you enjoy the result. If anything, the process is actually more important than the result. So I look at making videos, I look at my YouTube channel, I want to hit a million subscribers. That's my next goal. But I love the process of making the videos. I love— like, you wanted to ask me a question, like, hey, Stephen, let's do a video, man. Let's do it on YouTube.

Exactly.

Yeah, I love the live stuff. I love the— and like, kudos to you for stepping up and saying, hey, like, is this the first one you're doing by video?

Yeah, I've never done a live, um, video on YouTube, so this is it.

It's a new ballgame for me. Yeah, it's great, right? I love it. You're doing awesome.

It's awesome.

And you know what, just to sidestep on that, a lot of people don't— I offer that to a lot of people, a lot of people don't. They're like, "Oh, I'm not good on camera. I don't have the setup. I've never done it before," and don't take the leap to try something new and stay within their comfort zone. So it's great that you're doing this, and maybe it becomes a series for you. Standing Steven.

Yeah, there you go.

Standing Steven asking questions. That's right, Standing Steven. I love the process of the work that I'm doing. I love the work, not just being addicted to the outcome, that final goal. I think if you don't love your work, you don't love the process, you're going to quit. Now, it doesn't mean you love everything. There's going to be days that bad stuff happens. Life as an entrepreneur, which is mostly my audience— are you dealing with entrepreneurs or it's everybody?

Entrepreneurs, but pretty much anyone who's data-minded works. But entrepreneurs have a special place in my heart. Yeah. Cool.

So it's fine. So it's like, applies to anybody too though. Like if you're not, there'll be parts of your life, of your job, of your business that you just don't, you're not going to love every single day, every single moment. It's fine. But if you're waking up every day and doing something that you hate, it's really hard to stay motivated. So you have to really, you have to love the work. You have to have a passion for the work and whether, so I don't know how you want to crunch that down for your post, but if it's just, you know, love the work or, Enjoy the process more than the result. That might be another way to say it. That might be a different twist on what others are saying.

Absolutely.

I like that. The second thing I would think in terms of motivation is you need to have, you need to create an environment that really supports you achieving whatever goal you have. That motivation that you have, a lot of times I find with motivation that people get inspired in a moment, like maybe they're watching this and they got all inspired, or November 1st they check out your site and they read that post like, man, that was nuts. I got to— I'm on fire. I want to go do that thing that's been on my list forever. You know, and then the next day they wake up and it's all gone. What happened to that motivation? Why? Why is it— why did it disappear? And I like to think of it— I think Zig Ziglar said motivation is like like flossing, you have to do it daily. You need to have something in your environment. You need an environment and you need habits that support you to do the things that you want to do. So, you know, watching this video, you see my environment, right? Like you got pictures of people that inspire me that I walk in here and I'm looking these guys in the face every day and that means something to me. That, you know, that may not mean much to you or the people watching, you may not know half the people on the wall, That's okay. For me, it's motivating and it makes me want to get up and do something. You know, the people that you surround yourself with, the blogs that you read, like, are you, are you, are you guys out there, you know, reading Thoughtful Growth every day or are you reading, you know, trashy magazines or something, right? You know, the things that are in your environment are really important. So more so than just the strategies of what to do, to achieve your goal, like, hey, I want to, I want to hit 1 million subscribers on YouTube. Okay, great. I need to make more videos and I need to do better SEO on the titles and whatever it is I need to do. More important than that is fixing the mindset that you have that's blocking you because I know I need to do that, but I'm not doing it. Why am I not doing it? Well, because, you know, my day has sucked and the people in my life suck and my environment sucks. You know, so having that consistent routine, like for me, music is a big one. I'll wake up every day and one of the first things I do is I put on music and I have a belief playlist that I really resonate with and it's music that makes me move. And, you know, some of you guys love the songs, some of you guys may hate the songs. Not judging, right? Like you got to find the things that you might love. Thrash metal and that gets you jamming in the morning, if that's what it is, that wakes you out of your stupor.

Yeah, absolutely.

You're burnt out and not having a great sleep and now you're like, yeah, let's do it. Okay, woo, what's on my list?

Is Don't Stop Believing on your playlist? Just got to ask.

Don't Stop Believing? No, it should be.

Oh, it's not on your believe playlist.

It's funny, I was speaking at an event and and that was one of the songs they used, and they made me come on stage because I have— Got it. But yeah, I like the song. It's a great song. But I have a mix of all— I've got reggae on the list and rap on the list and Turkish songs on the list and just all over the place. Yeah, but I expect most people to listen to that and be like, that's nuts. Like, why? You know, that doesn't get it going for me. And it's fine. You just got to do the thing. You need that environment for you that really, that really helps.

Absolutely.

Actually, back to the first point about doing the work, there's a great quote. I don't know if you're including like other celebrities or video clips or anything, but there's a great one from Jerry Seinfeld that we did that is in his top 10 for sure. It might be the espresso, but it's in his top 10 if you check it out. Where he's talking about, uh, you have to do the work that other people find torturous. Yeah. So like, if you looked at my schedule, people look at my schedule and say I'm making— I make 5 to 9 videos a day for my channel.

That's insane.

It's insane. Like, today there will be 7 videos on the channel. It's crazy. I don't think it's crazy though. Like, I love it. But somebody looks at that and says, 5 to 9 videos a day? Like, every day? Yeah, yeah, every day. That's what we do. Yeah, they think that's nuts. That's torture. What you did, reaching out to 180 people to get feedback on motivation tips, right? People look at that, that's nuts, dude. Like, well, reach out to 5 or something, right?

Like, 186 replied. I reached out to about 514. So yeah, Yeah, right.

But you like doing that. You've got, you know, it's— you've got the passion for it. You want to see the data come in, right? You— yeah, you don't want just 3 data points. You want to have a substantial set of data points, right, if you're going to make decisions off of it. So that's the torture. It's torture for anybody else, but you do it because that's what you love. I do it because that's what I love. So somebody else stepping into your shoes would feel overwhelmed and, you know, go nuts. And so I don't know if you're including like video clips or celebrity quotes or whatever, but it might be. It's an interesting way to look at it because a lot of people would think of it as torture where we're— I like it. So what? So we had, you know, enjoy the process, enjoy the work. We had to have an environment and have routine that really supports you. My last tip, my last tip on motivation, my last tip for motivation. What really helped me was modeling success. And I think a lot of people don't have the right— a lot of people try to figure everything out themselves. This is my problem as an entrepreneur. When I was 19, I was part of a software company that was an owner in. And we were struggling and I sucked and we weren't making sales and, you know, like worst part of my life. And the thing that really got me through was when I finally clicked. It was like at my lowest point in my life where I just felt like a total failure. I realized that, wait a minute, I'm not the first guy to try to sell software before. You know, nobody sold our specific kind of bioinformatics Technical software. Okay, but software, somebody's figured this out, right? And then I thought about Bill Gates, and, and I looked at how Bill Gates got started, and it was through partnerships. Their big deal came when they connected with IBM, and IBM sold— every IBM ship had Microsoft software on it, and that was the deal that really made Microsoft take off, be a household name. But Microsoft was already a $7 million company when they made that deal with IBM. And that's still better than where I was. I wasn't a $7 million company. I mean, it's not a huge company, but it's more than what I had at the time. And how did they get there? Partnerships. It's always through partnerships. So I thought, hmm, how can I— like, okay, I work for Microsoft. What can I do? I need to find partnerships. And I started doing it. And within a couple of months, had my first partnership deal. It was $13,500. And when I'm making $300 a month, that was payday, man. That was payday, dude. That's like, it seems so small now, but $13.5K was like, dude, I'm set up. This is— I'm making bank here. And it all came from modeling what had already been done. You know, this guy here on the wall is Howard Schultz, started Starbucks. Starbucks is based entirely off of the Italian cafe scene. He was on vacation when he went to Milan with his family, and he saw how passionate Italians were about their coffee in their coffee houses and how coffee house was like this, the third home between work and home. It was like the third place people would go to meet at coffee house.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then you looked at North America and you have Dunkin' Donuts and these places where like you rush in, rush out, but not a place that you'd want to stay. And so we took something that worked for Starbucks for— I saw it work for Italians for decades and just brought it to North America. And that's how Starbucks became a, you know, multi-billion dollar company, making him a billionaire. And so the modeling success does two things. One, it gives you the strategies on what to do. Say, well, here's what worked for Italians. Okay, let's bring it to our market. So if you're looking at data points, you're looking at like specifics of what worked. Okay, that worked here. Let's try it here. Here, but it also gives you the motivation, which is back to the topic. Seeing that all these people started off with likely less than what you already have right now is motivation. When I, I used to read these stories of famous entrepreneurs every day. I have a book. This isn't it, but I had a book that I would read every day that have like 4 pages on an entrepreneur and to tell their stories. And I use it to get ideas, but also just the motivation to know that To know that Oprah Winfrey, you know, was abused so much as a child, was so poor that she wore potato sacks as dresses to school and was made fun of, right? Like, and how far she's come. You know, I have way more right now than what most of these people had when they were starting. And just like you guys watching, if you have an internet connection and you're watching this here now, you have way more than what a lot of the most successful entrepreneurs in the world had when they were starting. And so that to me was motivation that, you know, Oprah could do it, if Branson could do it, if all these people could do it without having that investor come and give them a lot of money to make it happen. Yeah, it made me feel like, you know what, I like, why am I complaining? Why am I feeling like I don't have resources? These guys had less. I can go out and do it too. And so that's why these people are on my wall too, is just the constant source of, of motivation. So modeling success and not just entrepreneurship, you know, for the, for your people who read your post, if they want to be a singer, if they want to be an actress, if they want to be a dentist, you know, like there's people you can look up to who've made it, who had a big impact. And that if you don't have those people in your life right now, it's something to look at and say, hey, it's possible. Like, they did it, I can do it too.

Yeah, absolutely. And hearing these, when I started, I was like, you know, I think I got this motivation thing down. And then hearing these experts pitch in and like give me their thoughts, it's just mind-blowing. One of the things you mentioned about, you know, asking the why, I don't know if you've ever heard of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He's a researcher, he's the author of Flow. If you've ever used the word like, man, I'm in the zone right now.

Like, oh yes. Okay. Flow. Sure.

Yeah. So he invented that word flow, meaning. And so he replied and he said, I asked myself, you know, if— is what I'm doing right now, does it have any importance in the universe? And if the answer is yes, then I'm gonna hustle as hard as I can. But if the answer is no, I'm just gonna give it up. It's like you mentioned with the why, you know, it matters why we do it.

So out of these 180-whatever people that you're connecting with, what what have you learned that is different? Not so much like what's most consistent, but what did you hear that you haven't heard before that really made you think?

I was in for a big surprise when I sent out the first batch of emails, 'cause as you know, the question was 3 tips for motivation when you feel lazy. And I heard back from some people. One of those was Derek Sivers, who founded CD Baby, big entrepreneur guy. Him and a few other people responded and they say, "I never feel lazy." I was like, "You never feel lazy? That's amazing to me." It was actually a pretty common theme as I heard back from more and more people that a lot of these big names, the most famous people, the people who've done the most, they responded, "I just don't have— I don't feel lazy. I've always got something to do. If I don't want to do it, I don't do it." That was a big surprise to me to see these huge people. I don't know, maybe they're superhuman or maybe it's just they are only focused on things they enjoy. I think that's probably it. It's interesting.

It is interesting. So I want to talk quickly about what your, your plans— I love helping new entrepreneurs. I want to see what Thoughtful Growth is all about. You are trying to apply data to personal development. Is that right?

You got it right.

So what are, what are some of your theories or what are some of the things that you want to try to tackle to learn more about or opinions thoughts you already have on it. Walk me through some of the ideas here.

Sure. Well, I guess the main, the big main idea is that I love like reaching goals, personal development, and things like that. And I would go out and I would try to find these articles on like XYZ topic and they weren't out there. I was like, but surely somebody's thought of this, right? Surely somebody has an article telling me exactly how to do this. Right? So if I want to get better at this step, how do I do it? And there's not an article on it. You know, there aren't case studies, there aren't explicit how-tos. There's a lot of articles like saying, it's really nice if you do this and a lot of opinions, but very few how-tos, data. So I wanted to kind of meet that need that I see and that I've talked to a lot of people and they're like, yeah, there's not really how-to personal development stuff, you know, how to accomplish this goal. So that's one of the things. I've got a few other articles that are going live on November 1st. The big one is this massive post that I'm talking about, but there's a few other articles I'm publishing, one on what strategies I've used for consistency, because consistency is the number one thing, right? If you're not consistent, nothing happens. Like you said, you know, you've got to floss every day. You have to be motivated every day. If you don't do something consistently, you're never going to work. And so I track everything. I track my sleep, I track what I eat, I track, you know, when I work out, I track everything. And so I went back to some of this old data and pulled some statistics and found like a time when I had actually increased my consistency by 216% by like a few different strategies. What made it different? So, you know, including those strategies, giving specific tips, stuff like that.

Cool. So what are some of the other areas that you want to tackle in personal development?

Oh boy, there's, there's a lot. Um, motivation is one that kind of honestly took me by surprise. I wasn't expecting so many people to be interested in it. Um, reaching goals is a big one for me. Being consistent is huge. But there's a lot of things that are applicable to almost anything. Like, I know you're a big salsa dancer, right? Um, I've seen you mention it a few times on your channel that something— so A few months ago, I was like, I am going to be a salsa dancer. You did not inspire me, someone else did. Yeah. And so I set out this whole plan, right? And it failed miserably. And I practiced 3 times and then gave up. I filmed myself at the beginning just to have, you know, a before video. And then I filmed myself at the end to have an after video. I only have a before video. And I think a lot of people do things like that, right? They're like, I wanna get better at guitar, or I wanna get better in my career, or I wanna lose weight, or I wanna, you know, start this habit or finish this habit or end this habit. And a lot of people are stuck where I am in that salsa dancing mode of like committing to something and then watching it slip out of their fingers. And then the next year they're like, ah, January 1st, let's do this. And then by February, nothing happens, right? So through salsa dancing and through like many, many other things that I've tried over the course of my life, I think there's like some specific techniques that help us stay with what we're doing. And I want to share those with people. Like people have been asking me, I feel like I should share it to a broader audience as well.

So what's one of the things that you found that's helped you? Uh, let's see, what's coming out in the article on November 1st?

Um, one of the things in the mode— in the consistency article that I talked about, but the with the working out was really trying to force myself through time blocking to do something. So like one of the reasons the dancing thing failed is 'cause I was like, every day I'm gonna do this. That's wrong. You have to say every day at this time, I'm gonna do this. So like I live in Florida, you live in Toronto, so it's a little colder where you are, but here I am a lot like, It's almost the end of October. It's like 80 degrees outside, right? So, you know, I had this morning routine where every day I'd go out and I'd start running. I'd run sprints, you know, every day, the whole year round. And that gives you this sort of ability and consistency. So I got in pretty good shape. And I was running with a friend one day where, correction, we were walking. I was like, hey man, let's go for sprints. And he's like, oh wait, We're gonna do sprints. Tell you what, we have to do these pyramid sprints. I'm like, what's a pyramid sprint? He's like, well, that's where you like sprint for a long time and then like a short time and like an even shorter time. And then you like reverse the pyramid and like your rest times between it is different. So then the pyramid reverses. I'm like, okay, we'll do it. So we start this sprint and at the end of the first two, I'm just like exhausted. I can't do it anymore. And my friend is dying. He's given up. The reason is I haven't been doing a lot. I haven't been doing the correct sprinting, but I've been doing it every day. Whereas he's just been researching and learning but never putting it into practice. So that consistency, you know, that's one of the things this article is going to touch on is that consistency of scheduling it and making sure you do it is really important. And another thing Jerry Seinfeld mentioned, you know, I don't know if you've heard of like the The calendar with the Xs.

Yeah, yeah. So don't lose a day.

Exactly. Keep it up. Keep it up. And setting your start date a few weeks in advance has really helped me. So I start my New Year's resolutions usually beginning of December, late November, and that gives me about a month. And if things aren't working so well, I can tweak it so that when I hit January 1st, I've already been doing it for 2 weeks and I already have a reason to keep going. And that's helped me with tons of resolutions that I can follow through the whole year because I've already got a head start on them.

It's cool, man. I'm excited to see everything that comes out. So you're using your own data and experiences as a proxy to then share, you know, stories and lessons that you've learned to help others. And then you're also doing these mashups to get data points from other people who've had success. Is that how you want to see yourself growing forward with it?

Yeah, I would say so. I mean, 186 data points is a pretty good start for a motivation article, I think.

Yeah, I'm excited to see it come out, man. Well, I appreciate the time and the questions and involving me. I would also, you know, I would also maybe put on your radar making some videos about this stuff because if this is your first time doing video, you're, you're pretty good, man. You're way better than I was when I got started. You got You got the passion, you got the energy, but also eloquent.

I got the standing up, are you kidding me?

You're standing up, standing up, Stephen. Yeah, I would— I mean, just like anything else, you know, you don't just put up a video and your YouTube channel takes off. You need to be consistent. You need to have regular content, all that stuff. But I could see you pulling out, you know, whatever those 10 things are that come out of that motivation article or however many, you know, and doing a video on each, you talking for a couple of minutes on each one. I think it could be a good path too. If you start a channel, I'll give you a chance. I'll subscribe. I'll see. I'll see what's happening.

Start with at least one subscriber, right? There you go.

You got me. And in the chat, people are saying, yeah, Stephen's good on video. So we'll throw that in. You got two. You got two subscribers.

Cool.

Well, good luck with the article. Good luck with the new business. Guys, check out the site November 1st. That said, hope you guys all have a great day. Continue to believe, and we'll see you soon.

Thanks, guys.