I've had a few tough weeks and while I've been struggling I've also been thinking about sharing a few things that keep me motivated and invite everyone to share their own experience and tips so we can all keep going a bit longer when things might otherwise seem to be turning to s#!*.
(I love the quote on
@agentf's profile,
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” I really relate to that and if anyone has any other cool quotes, feel free to share them below...)
The last few weeks have been pretty rough for me, starting with getting sick and being stuck in bed for nearly a week (and in the current climate this caused a few concerns as you can imagine). Then, during the time I was out of action I got kicked off an offer I'd been scaling nicely and besides that, I pretty much just let everything else I was running grind to a halt because I didn't have enough energy to maintain anything. And since I finally started feeling enough mojo to get back online and start throwing up a few campaigns everything I've been testing just seems to be going nowhere...
But if there's one thing I've learned in my life that's been more valuable than anything else, it's that the main difference between my biggest achievements and biggest failures has simply been
NOT GIVING UP. This is the #1 thing that keeps me motivated when times are tough - believing that I can succeed, somehow, if I just keep going!
With this in mind, I want to share three things that keep me motivated when I'm having a tough time.
1. Stories
I often turn to stories to keep me motivated. One of my favorite stories is something I read a while back about the author Stephen King who was one of the hardest working failures ever - he wrote 100's of stories and sent them to every publisher on earth but couldn't get anyone interested (he used to stick up the rejection letters on his wall like trophies). He was also one of his own harshest critics and in 1973 he was typing out the first draft of a new novel when he stopped and threw it into the trash in disgust. Luckily, when his wife was tidying up later that night, she noticed the screwed up pages and read them and talked him into writing some more... and less than a year later (and after 30 publishers initially rejected it) 'Carrie' was on its way to selling over 1 million copies in its first year, making it one of the most successful books in history!
Another Stephen King story I love is about how he started selling young film-makers (mostly college students) the rights to make a film from one of his short stories for just $1.00 (provided he maintained the right to make a commercial film from the story and as long as they sent him a copy of the movie they made). One of King's "Dollar Babies" was a guy called Frank Darabont, who bought the right to make a film from "The Woman in the Room", which kick-started a massive career in writing, directing and producing horror films and TV shows, including 'The Shawshank Redemption', 'The Green Mile' & 'The Walking Dead'!
Frank Darabont once said:
"If you're going to succeed, you've got to be like one of those punch-drunk fighters in the old Warner Bros. boxing pictures: too stupid to fall down, you just keep slugging and stay on your feet."
2. Goals
Goals are the key to feeling a sense of purpose and achievement. I used to talk about goals to staff I managed a few years ago and it used to be really frustrating because most of the time their only goal was 'not get fired'. The thing about goals is that they can be seriously motivating - I mean, imagine if you turned up to a basketball game, but the players just spent an hour mucking around on the court passing the ball around and completely ignoring the hoops. Boring, right?! Absolutely, because the goal of the game - scoring more than your opponent - is what makes any game interesting.
When I'm struggling for motivation I really try to focus on my goals and if that doesn't work I break up my normal goals into micro-goals - things I know I can achieve easily - because feelings of achievement still come from tiny successes and those feelings feed my motivation to achieve more and more, eventually pulling me out of the slump.
3. Science
I love science. And science has a lot to say about motivation. One of my favorites moments in science is the story of an experiment conduced in the 1980's by a psychologist called Dr Albert Bandura. The way the story goes, Bandura put an ad in the Palo Alto News seeking people with a debilitating fear of snakes who wanted to be cured. Hundreds of people responded and when they arrived at the basement in the psychology department they were greeted with a smile and casually invited to make their way into the next room and pick up a six foot boa constrictor resting in a terrarium! Unsurprisingly, no one would go near the room and eventually Bandura calmed everyone down and set them up on the other side of a window where they watched while he walked into the room, lifted the snake out of the terrarium and sat with it on his lap. After he was done he asked everyone to simply copy what he did, starting with just stepping into and out of the room. One-by-one most of the volunteers were willing to give it a try - starting with just sticking a toe into the room and pulling it out again. But after that, with a little more confidence, a few agreed to touch the snake (the first person did it wearing hockey gloves and pads). And after that many people who had been living with debilitating fear of snakes walked into the room, took the huge snake out of the terrarium and sat with it on their laps. And the amazing thing is the whole process took only 3 hours!
Still, the biggest breakthrough actually came later after a little more experimentation and after Bandura followed up on the people who had been cured of their snake phobia. That's when Dr Bandura discovered that as well as being free of their fear of snakes the people who had taken part in the experiment all put more effort into everything else they did. They had more resilience. They were more willing to persevere. They were more passionate about life. Which led to the the discovery of "self-efficacy", which is one of the most significant psychological breakthroughs in history. Self efficacy is "believing in your ability to succeed" (i.e. believing "you can do it") and it's something that you can produce through simply watching someone do something you'd like to be able to do and then copying what they do, one tiny step at a time (like reading a follow along or case study and then having a go!).
So that's it from me. I'm going to get back to grinding away at the campaigns I'm trying to get going. In the meantime, I'd love to hear about what helps you stay motivated.
