One of the key challenges of succeeding in business is finding the motivation to do the work necessary to achieve audacious goals.
Since there is no shortage of motivational speakers, self help gurus, visionary CEOs, and spiritual leaders, it would seem odd that motivation can sometimes be hard to come by.
Part of the reason for this is that motivation needs to be constantly renewed. Zig Ziglar famously said:
“People often say that motivation doesn’t last. Well, neither does bathing. That’s why we recommend it daily!”
Apart from the need for constant renewal, one of the areas of confusion when it comes to motivation is that different activities have different drivers.
As a result, you need to be clear about what kind of activity you are undertaking.
1. Creative Activities
Many of the most enjoyable activities in life are creative. Painting, cooking, singing, writing, inventing, coding, planting a garden, building a business, or raising a family.
If you are pursuing a creative endeavour, then your primary motivator should be love, which is commonly referred to in business circles as “passion”. You need to have a strong driving emotion that propels you every day to make plans, do the work, and to sacrifice your present enjoyment for the vision of what you hope to create.
Your passion can be for the work itself, however it is often much easier to be passionate about other people than about specific tasks. A common approach employed by successful creatives is to harness their love for a specific person and convert that passion into productive energy. Buddhism refers to this as the transmutation of desire. An artist has his muse, a husband has his wife, and CEOs have “the customer”.
2. Investing
Investing is similar to creativity in that it requires sacrifice. You are required to deploy funds today with the expectation of recovering your capital in the future plus a reasonable return.
Investors face dual motivations of maximising returns and minimising risk. This sounds easy enough, but proves challenging in practice.
The trade-off between risk and return depends a lot on the investor’s time horizon.
In the short run, volatility and the psychology of other investors are crucially important. Buying shares in Hertz or Spirit Airlines in mid-March 2020 could have made sense if you reasonably believed that other speculators would push the price of these stocks higher. This could have been a smart short term trade, even if you reasonably expected that both companies would ultimately go bankrupt.
In the medium run, volatility matters only if you run out of cash. If you are investing in the stock market, then you want to find businesses that have both reliable management and a strong competitive advantage. Two of the strongest sources of competitive advantage are economies of scale and network effects. If you are choosing between asset classes, you should pick ones that benefit from favourable macroeconomic trends. For example, gold prices being suppressed by central banks at the same time that the US Federal Reserve is printing money at a furious rate.
In the long run, trust can be betrayed and competitive advantages can fade. Investing in assets that have no counterparty risk is the surest way to preserve wealth in the long run. According to Jim Rickards, the richest families in Italy have maintained their wealth for more than 600 years. They have done this by investing in a balanced portfolio of real estate, gold, and fine art produced by famous artists.
3. Business
Starting a successful business is famously difficult because a business leader faces mixed motivations of creativity and investing.
On the one hand, you need to be inspired to create something that satisfies your target customers. On the other hand, you need to do so in a way that generates sufficient social or financial returns that the venture will be able to attract donors or investors and sustain itself over time.
Conclusion
What kind of activity are you currently engaged in?
By being clear about what you are doing, you can be clear about the factors that will drive your success.
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