Motivation

Motivation is a core component of a founder’s psychology. Motivation is your personal energy - what you use to engage with the world. Motivation is the emotional force that drives you - your abilities, skills, talents, dreams, and passions - into what you’re building.

Like all emotions, motivation is a physical experience. Take a minute to close your eyes and visualize a moment you felt deeply motivated - the first memory that comes to mind. Once you're locked in, bring your attention to your physical body. Where did you feel your motivation? What sensations did you feel? What was your motivation calling for your body and your mind to do? What made it easy or hard to listen? What else do you notice about yourself or this moment that generated your motivation?

 Do your best to familiarize yourself with your unique experience of motivation. The more familiar it feels to you, the more easily you can generate more of it because you'll know what feeling you're looking to create.

 Founders often feel motivation in the front of the belly - as heat or pressure. Sometimes that feeling travels up to their chest or shoulders. Sometimes it's felt as a churning river of energy flowing through their body from the middle of their back out through the front of their belly or arms/hands. Wherever motivation is located in the core, it's almost always felt as a pull forward - a literal, felt drive of your ambitions forward with warm, active energy.

Motivation can alternate between feeling subtle and feeling very powerful. It's best deployed in partnership with the mind, with a clear thoughtful plan and path of execution. Without a plan of action, the force of a founder's motivation can scatter the mind and cause overwhelm or a feeling of stuckness instead of driving your goals forward.

Too much motivation feels like you're pointed downhill but you're over your skis and you'll wreck sooner or later; founders need to learn how to balance the felt power of their motivation with their mind's need to pause, restrategize, and develop a working plan.

Founders can - and should - have multiple sources of motivation. And keep in mind that it’s normal for founders’ motivations to change and evolve over time as you and your startup continue to grow.

Being aware of what motivates you is helpful because the more sources of motivation you have, the more stores of energy you can tap into, and the more consistent and resilient your execution will be over time. Even if one source of motivation dries up or evolves, you’ll still have plenty others to keep going.

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What Motivates You?

Here's a list of motivations I've discovered over the course of my work with founders:

Ambition

• Creation

  The joy or satisfaction of creating. Building. Hacking. Making.

  • Most common in technical and product-facing founders (whereas passion and inspiration are more common for CEOs).

• Drive

• Excitement

  This is a type of joy.

• Fear

  Fear is a common core motivator of founders, but it leads to all kinds of unintended negative consequences to your relationships, communication style, decision-making and even overall health and well-being. It’s best to understand when you’re driven by fear and to switch to a different motivation source because fear constricts perspective, focuses your vision on short-term downside minimization, and keeps you in survival mode without the awareness that you can shift into upside maximization mode, where more options are available to you. When founders are motivated by fear, they are not operating at their highest or best level.

  Fear-based motivation can take many forms:

  • Fear of failure

  • Fear of death - your company's or otherwise. Founders often cognitively know they won’t actually physically die if their company dies, but they still experience the intensity of a ‘psychic death’ that makes them feel like they will

  • Fear of ‘losing it all’

  • Fear of success. This is the fear of being visible, where you could be scrutinized. Being successful requires bravery and the choice to be courageously ‘you’ out in the world. Many founders are afraid of this, feeling the possibility of being embarrassed, judged, or or ashamed of what others might think of them. These founders often struggle to recognize their gifts, see themselves clearly, and feel low self-worth instead.

  • Fear of disappointing others (especially if friends and family invested in your company. This fear isn’t usually reality-based.)

  • Fear of having lost time or ‘lost your one chance’

  • Fear of of not ‘achieving enough’

  • Fear of not ‘being enough’

  • Fear of uncertainty/unknown - fear of not knowing what you would do next, or how you would explain it to people if you failed

  • Fear of falling back into poverty or another difficult circumstance you experienced in the past

  • Fear of losing your visa if your employment status changes, and therefore losing the life you’ve built

• Greed

  This is a type of fear - the fear of never having enough.

• Guilt

  This is a type of fear- the fear of never doing enough, or of doing something badly/wrong and therefore losing connection with your community.

  Guilt is effective in that it is an energy source that leads to action, but is not an ideal motivation because it also degrades other sources of motivation. It also typically prevents an action, rather than creating action, and in that way it's limiting.

• Impact

  To do something that makes something better for someone, somewhere. To solve a problem for someone else. To be of service.

• Inspiration

  Depletion of inspiration in founders leads to burnout (same with passion). In this case, a necessary psychological fuel is gone or waning.

  Can be depleted without being protected by boundaries.

• Interest/curiosity

• Investment or inertia

  Motivation sourced from investment is ego-based so isn’t resilient. Motivation sourced from investment keeps founders chained to their companies and denies them the opportunity to change and do things differently. In this way, it serves to deplete a founder's motivation more - the sunk cost fallacy.

• Joy

• Legacy

  To leave something of yourself behind for future generations. To remain a part of the whole of humanity even after death.

• Loyalty

  • To users - rooted in service

  • To solving the problem - rooted in learning or purpose

  • To team - usually rooted in fear

  • To the board - always rooted in fear

• Money

  What will money get you? “Money” is what many founders report feeling motivated by, but there is always a deeper motivation that ‘money’ represents.‘Money’ is the stand-in for something more fundamental, like:

  • Freedom - a desire to be “free” of worry, stress, fear, or financial insecurity

  • Safety - especially if you’ve experienced meaningful financial insecurity or instability in your life

  • A desire to protect others from harm or insecurity (usually family members)

  • A desire to take care of others (usually family members)

  • When founders understand the deeper desire that “money” cloaks, they can pursue that goal more directly knowing that ‘money’ is just one possible path to it.

  • Are there ways you could experience more freedom? More safety? More stability for your loved ones? Right now, despite the number in your bank account? Decoupling the concept of money from these deeper goals will unlock more paths to achieve them. This is a net positive for you.

• Novelty

  Novelty can be necessary for neurodivergent brains that require dopamine spikes to function

• Shame

  Shame is a subvariant of fear - the fear of being bad or unwanted/unlovable at your very core.

  Perfectionism is a shame-based source of motivation, because it protects the founder from doing something badly (or wrong) and therefore being a disappointment to others. What perfectionistic founders need more than ‘to do it all right,’ is the ability to tolerate the feeling of potentially disappointing others. This unlocks more action.

  Shame is effective in that it is an energy source that leads to action, but is not an ideal motivation because it also degrades other sources of motivation. For example, if you feel ashamed of yourself for how bad your writing is (speaking from personal experience), it won’t matter how passionate you are about getting a message out to the world. Your shame will block that motivation from taking form.

• Stress

  Stress is the manifestation of fear in your body. Founders can use this discomfort as activation energy - to escape the uncomfortable feelings, they leap to action instead.

• Passion

  Depletion of passion in founders leads to burnout (same with inspiration). In this type of burnout, a necessary fuel is gone or waning.

  • Can be depleted without being protected by boundaries.

  • Can be replenished through recurring touchpoints between the founder and their source of passion (e.g. a sales-focused founder who is passionate about solving problems for their user should always have touchpoints with their customer regardless of how many people they hire underneath them).

• Personal growth or learning

  To be challenged, continuously, with the goal of improving oneself or one’s métier.

  Being motivated by growth is not the same as being terrified of stagnation. Many founders believe they're motivated by growth when in fact, they've found a prosocial way of experiencing fear - that they'll lose their job, fail at their role, or even lose their sense of self if they aren't constantly growing, and all the same caveats of being motivated by fear apply.

• Play

• Proving people wrong (or right)

  This is effective in that it’s an energy source that leads to action, but it must be bolstered by other motivations because it will deplete you if this is your only energy source.

  This is often a type of shame, guilt, and/or fear (wherein the founder believes that they are bad or ‘not enough’ and so go searching for other people to validate their core being.)

  ‘Proving people wrong’ is not self-regenerating feedback loop. Instead, it requires other people (or the idea of other people) which displaces the locus of control from inside of you to outside of you, thereby weakening it. This motivation overextends the founder’s psychology and psychological resources.. which is why it can’t last for very long and can be broken easily. Conversely, since you’ll never actually know whether you prove people wrong (or right) since you’ll never be a perfect predictor of other people’s judgment of you, this motivation will run on an endless loop as you continually seek others’ wrongness or rightness of you. This is another reason why it’s fragile - founders simply run out of steam when they rely on this.

• Purpose

• Time

  • i.e. working toward deadlines. This can be necessary for neurodivergent brains that require dopamine spikes to function

• Values

  Working to create out of a deep sense of values alignment (’this is right’) is a subtle but incredibly powerful motivation. It makes work feel more like a spiritual calling.

  But - if your values are not aligned with your work, your startup’s mission, or your role, it will instead create guilt and burnout (which are demotivating) instead of motivation.