Don't Rely on Motivation. Here's What I Use Instead.

I've got a feeling that you know exactly what you need to do right now to grow your business, but you just can't get yourself to actually get it done. Don't worry, I got your back. What I'm about to say might sound strange from someone who's published over 2,800 podcast episodes at least 3 days a week for the last 12 years. In those 12 years, in those 2,800 episodes, I did not rely on motivation. At all. Okay. Over 2,800 episodes. Never missed one. We're talking sick days, holidays, the hardest years of my business, days where I woke up and I wanted to do absolutely anything else. Right? The episodes still went out. Here's the truth about how those episodes went out. It was not motivation. Motivation doesn't show up 2,800 times in a row. Nothing shows up 2,800 times in a row except for a system. And today I want to give you that system. The exact 5-step approach I use to get things done, whether I feel like it or not. Because here's a secret that nobody talks about online, and that is that the most productive people that you know do what they need to do regardless of how they feel. They build something stronger than a feeling. They build a system, a reliable system. One that I'm going to share with you right now. Let's get into it. Step 1: Stop waiting to feel like it. The biggest lie about motivation is the order of operations. Most people believe motivation comes first and action comes second. I need to feel motivated so that I can start. So they wait. They wait until they are in the right mood, in the right energy, are feeling the right vibe. They're waiting for that perfect day, that perfect morning where everything aligns and they feel like doing what they need to do. And that morning, that day rarely comes because that is not how motivation works. OK? Here is what actually works. Action comes first. Motivation comes second. Motivation is not the cause of action. Motivation is actually the result of it. You get motivated when you take action. Think about the last time you didn't wanna go to the gym, okay? You had to drag yourself away from wherever you're doing, watching TV, maybe you were just lounging in the house and you had to lace up your shoes and head to the gym. You got to the gym, you started doing the exercises and 15 minutes in, you start to feel a little bit better, right? 20 minutes in, you're glad that you actually made it. By the time you're 30 minutes into your workout, you're like feeling great about yourself. You're so motivated and you can't wait to go to the gym tomorrow. See what happens here? The motivation shows up after you start, not before. This is so true, and it's true for almost everything you do, especially things that you have to show up for every single day, like your business, right? The workout was just an example, but this could be sales calls. This could be creating content. This could be having difficult conversations with your team. The project that you're working on or you've been avoiding working on for months. Starting anything is the hardest part. So I want to give you a practical rule. You need to follow this rule like your life depends on it. And in a lot of ways it does. The life that you want. Okay. Never, and I mean never negotiate with yourself about whether you feel like starting. Just start. You should see the negotiation or the dialog that you're having with the head of you should not do it. Should I do it? You see that as a signal to take action, like, Once you experience that, okay, that means I have to do it. Okay, just start. Take one small step, whether that's opening up a spreadsheet to start budgeting for your next project and start entering some numbers. Give it 5 minutes, give it 10 minutes. In 15 minutes, I'm telling you, you're going to feel better about it. I found that if after 15 minutes of genuine effort you still cannot get into it, you have my permission to stop. But I'm telling you, you will be more motivated to continue because now you're invested, right? You have sunk costs. You have put in some time and effort, and now you're in the flow. So I want to give you an exercise so that you can get over this hurdle. And here it is. Pick the one task you've been avoiding this week. Okay. The one that you kind of never cross off. The thing that is kind of in the too hard basket. Okay. Set a timer for 15 minutes on your watch, on your phone, on your whatever. Okay. And start working on it just for 15 minutes. I don't want you to wait until you feel ready. Just see this as an exercise. Even if you don't do this ever again, I want you to just experience this. Give it 15 minutes. Work on that thing that you know is going to take longer than 15 minutes. Maybe it'll take you 5 hours. Maybe it's going to take you 5 days, but just give it 15 minutes and see how you feel after the 15 minutes. I guarantee you will feel more motivated to continue working on it You'll feel a lot less intimidated by the task, and you will start to make some headway on something that you've been avoiding for a very long time. Step 2: Make the mission bigger than the mood. Here is the problem with relying on how you feel. Feelings are like the weather. They change daily, sometimes hourly. Okay? And it's not a reliable source for you to base your actions on. If your work only happens when the weather is good, your feelings are good, your output will be unpredictable as the weather. You're not going to know how much output or when this output would happen. All right. You need something a little bit more consistent. People who produce consistent results that I found in my space, in business, in life, are not people that are constantly in a good mood. In fact, they are dealing with a lot of challenges in life and business. And despite those challenges, they are able to produce consistent, good work. They are people who have a reason for working hard and working consistently that is bigger than their mood. This is super important. Okay? And if you take anything away from today's lesson, it's this step. Okay? When I was building Webinar Ninja, my software company, we had entire seasons where things were just not going well. All right. We were having some really dark days where we are not sure if we're going to be able to sustain the business, let alone grow the business. Costs are rising. Competition was closing in. Growth was totally flat. Okay. The mood on most of those days, you can guess it was not great, right? I wasn't motivated to keep going. But what kept me working hard was something beyond what I was feeling in the moment. And that is a mission. Okay. Is something that's deep inside of you. Having people be financially free by growing their businesses through webinars was my mission through Webinar Ninja. Why was that so important to me? Because I know how hard it is to be poor. I grew up in an immigrant family. We were pretty poor. I didn't realize it at the time growing up, but looking back at it, we were poor. Okay? We didn't really buy things from stores. My dad would get things from Goodwill and come home with a big black garbage bag and we'd see what's inside the bag and we would be like, oh, we're so happy to have a jean jacket from 10 years ago. Okay, and that was our shopping, and that was how it was. And I didn't think it was something strange at the time, but looking back at it, oh, we were pretty poor, right? We were— we weren't living it up, okay? Most of my, uh, schoolmates and my friends at school had new Air Jordans every single year or every 6 months. Um, I was, uh, buying the clearance rack shoes that were at Marshalls, right, which is a bargain store in the States. But I share this with you because I know the struggle of being poor. I know my parents really had a hard time with money. I know that, you know, the phone would ring and we would know that on the other side were people trying to reach my parents because they had things to pay off. Okay. And that is not something I like to go back to. That's something that really is painful for me to share. But I share it with you because I know that that is not a life that is fulfilling. Okay? It's very hard for you to reach your potential when you are limited financially. And knowing that so well, it became part of my mission to help other people become financially free so that not only do I get myself out of that situation, but I help other people get through that situation because I know that situation so well. I never forget where I come from because it reminds me of why I'm doing what I'm doing. It's the reason. It's my motivation. It's— the thing that gets me over any bad moods. Okay? My mood becomes irrelevant once I remind myself of the mission that I'm on. You don't need to ask yourself whether you feel like it anymore. You ask yourself whether the mission still matters to you. And if that mission is strong enough, it's going to push you to go beyond what you're feeling at the moment. So in those dark days where we were trying to grow up in our ninja and we were struggling and I had to motivate myself to, you know, perform on a webinar and to sell our products or services. I knew that even if I can get one person to buy our software, to allow them to run webinars, to sell their products and services so that they could pay their bills, so they could pay their rent, so they can be able to provide for their family and not have to go through what my family had to go through. That was motivation enough for me to get up and hit, uh, start webinar inside the software and get going. So here's a question you need to answer right now because you need an answer to this. Why are you doing this? Not on the surface. Yeah, you want to make money. Yeah, you want to live a better life. Yeah, you want those material things in life, which are all great. Fantastic. But what's the real reason behind what you do? Who does your work serve? What does it make possible for those people? Right. What do you do that helps them at a higher level? I want you to write down your answer. Put it on a Post-it note. Put it on your monitor. Put it where you could see it. I had this right down. I wrote down. Being poor sucks. I wrote that down on my Post-it note, put it on my monitor. Every time I opened my laptop, I saw it. And it was not only a motivation for me to make sure that I, uh, make sure I grow my wealth and I never would go back to that situation my parents were in, uh, but also it was a motivation for me to help other people to never have to experience that. Because that pain is real. And I'm actually glad I went through that experience as a young kid growing up. My parents didn't have much. Because I understand and it can resonate with other people and I can help them. And it helps me help them through having that mission, having that vision of understanding this is a problem that needs to be solved. So I want to give you an exercise. Write down one sentence that captures why your work matters beyond the money. OK, put it on your desk, put it on a Post-it note, put it on your monitor, make it your phone wallpaper. OK. You could even write it with a little marker in your bathroom mirror so you could see it every morning, right? Some people like to do that as well. That's totally fine. Read it to yourself every morning. Remind yourself why you're doing what you're doing, because you're going to need it. Some days are going to be harder than others, and you're going to need that mission on those hard days. Step 3: Design your environment to do the work for you. Here's something I learned about building my first business while working. As a full-time teacher. Willpower is unreliable. Okay? Your environment is essential because you can control your environment. You can make your environment reliable. Right? When I was building my side businesses, I did not try to work from home because home is a place filled with distractions. I'm not just talking about the people that are distracting. I'm talking about the TV. I'm talking about the PlayStation, the bed. The fridge full of food, all the comforts around you, okay? It doesn't work, trust me, all right? So what I did instead is that when I was coming home from work, I would stop by a coworking space. Every Tuesday and every Thursday evening, and even on Saturdays, I would put in a good day's work in that coworking space. And guess what happened in that environment? I worked because the space is made to work, right? Not because I suddenly became some super disciplined person. Is because everybody around me was working. Everybody around me was building businesses. There was no TV to turn on. There was no other distractions, right? I just had to sit down and get things done. The lesson here is that you want to make sure you make things easy on yourself. Why are you making this so hard on yourself? Allow the environment to make the decision for you. The environment is going to make it more conducive for you to focus and get things done. This is one of the most underrated productivity tools that exists, in my opinion, is the environment, right? If you can't go to a coworking space, go to the library, right? Find a space that is quiet, that allows you to focus, that has the least amount of distractions possible. Stop trying to overpower the environment, right? Stop trying to make it super difficult on yourself. Okay? Just make it easy by having an environment that makes it easy for you to work. One thing I do if I want to really focus and get something done is I put my phone in another room. I just remove all the friction that can possibly get in the way of me accomplishing what I need to get done. The point of step 3 is that you are intentionally designing an environment that allows you to be productive. You notice that so far in this episode, I'm not talking about, you know, playing some Rocky playlist, okay? Or watching some motivational video to get you pumped, right? This is something that's reliable, that's practical, that you could repeat over and over again, building the right environment, Making sure that you're focused. Making sure you have something internal, an internal mission or motivation to get things done, rather than relying on something external to happen for you to be able to produce the work you need to produce. So as an exercise for this step, identify one environmental change that could improve your focus this week. It could be a different location. It could be putting your phone in the drawer. It could be something as specific as, you know, shutting off all social media on your desktop. Whatever it might be. Make one change, write it down and stick to it for 7 days and see how it impacts your behavior and impacts your productivity. Hey, if this episode is giving you some practical steps, a practical system to help you stay focused, then I want you to subscribe to the show because we have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. We're going to go deep on how do you choose which business to start if you're fresh and you're new to business and you're not sure which business idea to go after, which product or service to offer the world, then you're going to love this episode because it's going to make it super clear on what your first steps are. Hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode. Now, the next step is step 4. And before I get into step 4, I want to ask you an honest question. Do you actually want this? Do you actually want to build this business, change your life, change your lifestyle, whatever it might be, the reasons behind it? Ask yourself, do you actually really want this? Because if you do, you will find a way to get it done. You will find a way to get focused. Right. And I'm asking you this to kind of give you a little bit of a wake-up call to get serious, to really commit. Some of us don't want to commit because we're afraid to fail, but you might as well just go for 100%. And when I was starting my career as an entrepreneur, I had to ask myself this question constantly. Do I actually really want this? Because if I don't want this, I might as well just stop trying. Okay. But if I really do want it, then I got to go all out. I got to play all out. I got to just really give it my all. And allow myself to have a chance to win by focusing. So that's a little side note. It's not one of the steps, but I just wanted to get you to ask that question because I had to ask that question myself when I was getting started. So let's get into step 4, and that's to gamify the grind. The truth about getting things done that nobody talks about is that a lot of the most important work you have to do is boring. Okay? Follow-up emails, bookkeeping, creating content, sometimes it just gets boring because it's so repetitive. I would say about 80% of what you're going to do every day as a business owner is not very exciting. Okay? It's pretty mediocre, but it all matters. It's important and you need to get it done. And waiting to feel excited about it is not how you get it done. As you mentioned, it's not about your feelings. You need to make sure that you have a strategy. So here's what you do instead. You make growth a game, not the task itself, but the progress that you're on, the mission and the steps that you're on to get to where you want to go in your business. For example, today is Thursday, the day I'm recording this. I have put out on my calendar that I'm going to be recording 2 episodes today and 2 episodes tomorrow. If I accomplish that task, I have passed this level. I have moved on to the next level. I have won the week. Okay, this is how I gamify. I like to make sure I have goals set up for me so that I can have something to work towards and feel like I've accomplished something. So I feel like I have won at something that I set out to do. Maybe for you it's something different. Maybe your output's something different, but always challenge yourself to hit a certain mark and maybe you want to beat last week's output, right? What happens if the numbers are not going the way you want to go in your business? So say, for example, you have to do 5 sales calls this week. Well, why don't you try for next week to do 10 sales calls, see if that impacts how many sales you make, right? Because it's a numbers game in business. The more contacts, the more sales calls you make, the more chance you're going to have of making more sales. This is the point I'm trying to make, is that you need to gamify this so that you have small incremental goals that work you towards the larger goal. The task itself might be boring. It may not be the most exciting thing you have to do, But the game of it is not, right? Track your numbers, set targets, compete with your previous self, with your, with Omar of last week is what I try to do. Am I better than Omar last week? If yes, let me show me the numbers. What are the numbers look like? And that will allow me to feel like I'm making progress. You need to have some way to track if you're actually making progress or not. And that's why they say Peter Drucker, who's the father or grandfather of marketing and sales, he says, "What gets measured gets managed." So you have to measure so that you can know if you are actually getting better. And I'm here to tell you that sometimes you're going to have to grind it out before you get results, okay? When we were building our social media presence, we published over 650 pieces of content before we found real traction, when we started getting followers and viewers. Most of that production was very repetitive because we're testing, we're trying new things, you know, we're seeing what works and what doesn't. And what kept me engaged to create all that content was the game of the experiment of seeing what will work and what will not and how we're going to actually hit the mark. And I'm going to tell you right now, as somebody who's been working on their social media for the last few years, a lot of the stuff that you create is not going to do well. But some things will do well and that's where you kind of see the game of it. It's like, okay, what, why did that do well? How can I do more of that? So for me, iteration is the game that I try to pull out of doing things that are very repetitive, right? How can I iterate, experiment, improve what we're doing through those iterations, right? So you gotta find your version of the game because the person who can make boring work engaging has a superpower because they could do more and more of that work and get better results. All right. And I'm telling you right now, most people don't make it in business because they don't figure this one out. They don't actually gamify the things that are mundane, that are tough to do on a consistent basis. Because at the end of the day, somebody who could withstand the test of time and do things over and over again and get better and better at it, they're the ones that achieve that level of mastery and differentiate themselves from the crowd. So here's your exercise for this step. Pick one recurring task you find boring in your regular work each week, and I want you to attach a measurable target to it. Track it visibly, whether it's with a spreadsheet or whether it's just paper and pen. For the next 2 weeks, track it. Watch what happens to your relationship with the task when you're keeping score. I find that when you're keeping score and you're seeing what's happening, you start to get more engaged. You start to feel like, hey, maybe I should do something a little bit different. Maybe I should change something up. How can I improve my results? It's hard for you to know if you're winning if you have no scoreboard. So create yourself a scoreboard so that you could track what's happening and see if you're improving. So I'll give you a quick example for this exercise. Say you are creating short reels for Instagram and right now you're creating 3 reels a week. Well, what happens if you create 6 reels a week? How many views are you going to get? Obviously, you're going to get more views because you're creating more Reels. Well, what happens when you create more Reels is you learn what works and what doesn't work. Are your average views per Reel increasing as you're increasing the volume? Well, you won't know until you track it. Okay, so that's just one example of this exercise where you could pick a recurring task that you might find a little bit boring and attach a measurable target to it. Step 5. Get accountability that has some teeth. And here's the final piece, and it's what makes really a huge difference when you put it all together. You need external accountability. I'm going to tell you something that a lot of people won't say to your face. Business is extremely hard. Most people don't make it. Most people fail. So what you need to do to have the best possible chance of success is for you to line up as much things to your advantage. Okay? You want to make sure that you use everything you can possibly to help you be successful. And one of that is accountability, is getting somebody outside or some people. It could be a mastermind group. It could be a community. It could be a loved one in your family that will hold your feet to the fire. And this is not because you're weak. This is because you're smart. This is because you're doing everything you can so that you can increase your likelihood of success. This is because as human beings, we are wired for social accountability. We naturally show up differently when someone is expecting us to show up. Think about it. You will cancel a solo gym session. You know, you have to go to the gym, told yourself, I got to go to gym today at 5 PM, and 5 PM rolls around, you're not feeling it. It's easy for you to cancel on yourself, but If someone is going to meet you at the gym at 5 p.m., it's much harder to send that text or give them a call and say, hey, I'm not going to make it. So you just avoid that confrontation and just show up and go to the gym. It's the same workout, it's the same gym, but it's a different structure. You have a completely different way to follow through because you now you have somebody outside relying on you to show up. You need to do the same thing in your business, right? Whether it's having an accountability group where every week you have a Zoom call and you ask each other, hey, did you actually fulfill your to-do list for the week? Did you accomplish your goals? Did you hit your numbers? This is a great way, especially in the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, to hold your feet to the fire, to hold yourself accountable, to have external motivation, to have external accountability. This could be just sharing your goals publicly with your audience on social media, saying, hey, I'm going to launch my product on this date. And guess what? You'll have a lot of motivation to launch on that day and not delay and not push back the deadline because Everybody already heard when this is going to happen. You don't want to sound like you're a wishy-washy person and somebody that doesn't fulfill on your promises. You got some money? Get a coach, right? Get a coach that could hold your feet to the fire, that could make sure to hold you accountable and make sure that you're doing what you need to do. Find a way to get somebody outside yourself. And this could be simply just telling your roommate, telling your parents if you're living with your parents, telling your, your loved one, your significant other, hey, This is what I got to get done this week. Do you mind if I share with you if I got it done or not at the end of every week? It's simple as that. It takes 5 minutes. And here's the thing. The moment your commitment becomes visible to somebody else, the cost of quitting changes, becomes really expensive to quit because now you got to save face. Now you got to fess up to the fact that you didn't, you know, accomplish what you're supposed to accomplish. And you don't have to just deal with yourself. You got to deal with the reaction of others. So make it harder for yourself to quit. Make it harder on yourself not to do what you're supposed to do. Every consistent output in my career has had some form of accountability or some sort of accountability structure behind it. This podcast, right, has an audience that's expecting an episode every single Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Okay. I am conscious of this fact, and this is why I make sure that we produce these episodes in advance so that we're never behind, so we never are late on publishing these episodes. I'm very, very conscious of the fact that not only will I let down myself, but I'll let down an audience, let down my team if I don't show up and do what I need to do. By the way, you can apply this not just to yourself, but to your whole team. One of the best ways to do this is to make sure your team's work is visible to everybody else. So this could be like a progress chart, this could be a Kanban board, this could be something that people could see, okay, this is where I'm supposed to be working. These are the things that are on my plate. This is what I need to do by this time. A deadline, a to-do list, whatever it might be. By having commitments public, it motivates people to do what they need to do. So here's your exercise for this step. I want you to take the most important task you're working on this week, and I want you to make it visible to somebody other than yourself. This could be a family member. It could be somebody that's in an accountability group, a Facebook group, whatever it might be. Just make it publicly known to somebody else what you're working on and ask them if you could circle back with them a week later to check in on how it went, right? Did you accomplish what you set out to do? How much did you accomplish? What were the results? By just doing that, you're gonna move the needle towards you. You're gonna be able to not only feel the pressure of disappointing somebody else, but you're also gonna feel the pressure to also make sure that you share a win with somebody. You could celebrate somebody when you accomplish what you're supposed to accomplish to move you closer to your goals. So there you have it. I just shared with you my complete system for getting things done, whether you feel like it or not. Okay, so stop waiting to feel like it, right? It's not going to happen. Action creates motivation. You got to get into the habit of taking action regardless of how you feel. And when you take action, you will start to feel motivated, not the other way around. Remember, find that mission, that thing that's inside you that will overcome any mood because Your feelings shouldn't be like the weather, where— wherever you feel like it or not, you're going to decide your fate based on how you feel. No, that's not how you want to go. You want to have a deep, strong mission that drives you to get up and do what you need to do regardless of how you feel. You want to design your environment around yourself, right? Make sure you have an environment that is conducive to staying focused. Okay, gamify the grind, right? Find a way to track what you're doing and make sure that you're making progress and use those numbers to make you feel motivated that you are making progress and get some accountability. Because when you have accountability, you have somebody outside yourself or some people outside yourself that are holding you accountable. But also, you don't want to disappoint them. You want to make sure that you show them that you walk the walk, talk the talk. In my 20 years of entrepreneurship, it all boils down to this. Doing what you told yourself you're going to do regardless of how you feel. Keeping your promises to yourself, because when you break promises to yourself, it's a very, very fast way to lose confidence. The opposite is true. You build confidence by actually consistently doing and holding your promises to yourself, right? Doing what you said you're going to do over and over, proving to yourself that you actually get things done. Use this system to build that confidence. I hope today's episode was helpful. If it was, I highly recommend you check out this next episode that we recently published called The 5 Silent Killers of Success and How to Avoid Them, because being inconsistent is one of those 5 killers. Okay? But there are other, other 4 that you need to know. So make sure you tune in that episode so you don't miss it. Thanks so much for being part of today's episode. Keep moving forward. The whole point of this podcast, why we started in the first place 12 years ago, was to give you enough so that you can implement. Learn something, implement it today so that you have a better business tomorrow. Come back for the next episode. Learn something, implement, rinse and repeat. You get the point. This is only valuable if you implement what you learn. So go ahead and just go through the 5 steps that I discussed with you today and make it happen. I'll see you in the next one.