Self-Reliance And Self-Motivation

Self-Reliance And Self-Motivation

For the past couple of days, I’ve written about some of the intangible skills that young entrepreneurs should develop. You can read those here and here.

This will be the last one in the series, and it’s pretty important. It’s about developing self-reliance and self-motivation; two skills which you absolutely, no questions asked, will need to develop when you’re young and entrepreneurial-minded.

Self-Reliance

When you’re an entrepreneur, the buck starts and stops with you.

Nobody will tell you to get out of bed in the morning. Nobody makes you reply to your emails or send out pitches to clients. There’s nobody in the world that cares about your business – or your life – as much as you should.

Now, if you go to business chambers or you talk to government officials about starting your business, you’ll probably get some spiel about how there are support networks and grants, funding and all kinds of wonderful things available to you. If you go to college, you’ll get professors who’ll tell you the world is wonderful and nothing is going to go wrong – you’re on the path to prosperity and a carefree life already.

That’s not going to happen.

If you want to succeed, then you must expect to have to do everything yourself without help. Sometimes help will come along, and hopefully you have family, friends and associates who’ll help you along the way. It is not their job to make you successful.

It’s your responsibility. Your individual success is up to you. That can either be liberating or terrifying (and probably a measure of both) depending on how you look at the world.

Let’s talk about the world.

Generational Difficulties… Not Your Fault

You don’t have to look very far to assume we’re in a dystopian hell of other people’s making.

Whether you’re on a college campus where there are riots about patriarchy and white men being evil or you’re reading the daily news which states that all millennials are good for nothing low lives who are ruining the world that the baby boomers made…

… it all looks bleak.

Now, it’s easy to despair about the world. 24/7 news cycles and echo chambers of all shapes and sizes make it easier than ever to lose hope in the world. Regardless of your political or social leanings, there are certain issues that the young generation (not just entrepreneurs but everyone) has to deal with.

• Massive cost of living increases
• The student loan bubble
• Ageing population
• Contracting manufacturing and job markets (also automation apocalypse)
• Social warfare (I’m not exaggerating with that statement)
• Economic uncertainty

Now, forget the old people who tell you to ignore this stuff and keep your mouth shut when they say “Back in my day it was harder and you don’t know how easy you’ve got it”

Part of that social warfare mentioned above is that generations are weaponised against each other.

The fact is, there are very real issues facing young people and the fact that you eat avocado toast does not in any way make those issues either less real or alternatively your fault.

There are problems in the world and they’re not your fault.

But…

… But They’re Still Your Problem

The chips are down, the fix is in, and there are big problems with the world that are going to act negatively upon your chances of success.

It costs tens of thousands to get an education that was once free. You can only get a mortgage if you have a great job and a well-paid partner to go with it. Whereas your grandfather was a janitor who worked 20 hours a week and bought a house and had five kids.

So on and so forth. Don’t get me started on the political and social issues. You might think weed should be legal or that logging companies should stop killing the Amazon.

Look… none of these things are your fault and every generation inherits issues.

You can’t let that hold you down though. You have a choice; you either face the fact that life isn’t going to be a straightforward road or you don’t.

Complaining about the price of houses won’t get you one. Complaining about marriage laws won’t bring you a happy marriage.

You can’t complain away these meta-issues and you can’t live your life blindly hoping that either a magical politician is going to drop from the sky and fix those issues or pretend you live in a world where those issues don’t exist.

So what do you do?

You Have To Fix Them

The above heading is slightly misleading but it’s important because so many young people are drawn to slacktivism and hash tag protests.

Those things don’t fix anything. If you’re lucky, you might contribute to some TV non-entity getting suspended or something. But realistically, your debt isn’t going to disappear because you use Twitter angrily and people aren’t going to take you seriously because you protest outside a bakery for gay rights or whatever.

Look long and hard at all of those things and then go into the law books and record books and find out exactly what long term benefit those behaviours have. I’ll spoil it for you: None.

You have to work within the confines of what you can possibly do and work towards achievable goals.

If you’re worried about the obesity crisis, the best thing you can do is exercise, eat right and encourage your close family and friends to do the same. At a push, buy good food.

If you’re worried about social issues like the treatment of women (or men) in society then roll up your sleeves and actually help people as opposed to tweeting about it.

Or, if you’re an environmentally conscious person, the best you can do isn’t to write seething articles about Monsanto, it’s to buy organic produce and plant some trees.

The answers aren’t in the meta-sociological arena; they’re in the personal one. Hence self-reliance.

It’s a hard road but that’s why you have to self-motivate.

Self-Motivation

If you follow the path above and you eschew identifying yourself as some political group or whatever, you lose some of the benefits: namely the illusion that someone will help you out and tell you where to go next.

Therefore, you have to cultivate self-motivation. Here’s how.

Find Your Goals

I’m not going to do the motivational hustle. Whatever you want to achieve, you can probably do it. But you have to find for yourself what you want to achieve. This is especially true when it comes to starting a business.

You will, if your business is right for you, spend hours, months and days working on it. If you don’t care about whatever it is you’re doing, you’re going to hate it. If you love it, then great.

Nobody can tell you what your business should do, what your goals should look like or “the best way to live.” If they do, then they’re selling you something. (See below.)

There are millionaires who’ve started cleaning businesses and people who make next to no money in their dream jobs where they save endangered animals from poachers. If you’re entrepreneurial, you can start a business solving any problem anywhere in the world. Don’t let some life coach tell you that you have to make money investing in bitcoin or selling TeeSpring t-shirts or whatever.

Find your skills. Find your passions. Solve the problems that you can solve. Forget everything else, because someone else will be better at it than you.

Build Towards Your Goals and Avoid Stagnation

One you have a set of skills and goals, you have to work towards them. Remember, you can’t rely on anyone to hold your hand. Your success is your reward to grab for and your burden to bear.

Working towards your goals involves an individual framework that I obviously can’t describe here. But I can tell you that you should be able to break all of your big goals down into daily habits and repeatable systems so that you know if you’re progressing.

That’s the hard bi, cognitively.

The easy bit is sticking at those systems day in and day out until you achieve what you need to. The key take away here again is that this is something, whatever it might be, that you have to do yourself.

I’ll write more about avoiding stagnation in a couple of days. We’re running long on this article and it’ll take it in a direction I don’t want to go in.

Forget The Hustlers and Motivation Gurus

The whole point of this article: Generate your motivation internally.

By all means compete with other people and if you want to be the best in the world at what you do, then go for it. But still, your motivation and your success both need to be internally motivated and generated. If you rely on someone else for motivation, then you are in the wrong space.

Motivation gurus succeed at one thing: You get addicted to their content. If you wake up and think, “I know… I will get on my computer and watch Guru McGuruFace’s latest YouTube Inspirational Video” then you’re failing. You’re not motivated you’re waiting for the next dopamine hit.

Your first thing to do when you wake up should be “I’m going to do whatever I planned to do to get me closer to my goal today.” This isn’t a discipline thing; if you don’t wake up thinking you want to achieve something then you need a better goal that’s more in tune with what you want.

It’s very easy to endlessly consume “helpful” or “motivational” content. You can spend hours a day doing it. Until you act that’s all worthless time. Nobody has ever made money from watching a motivational video. Nobody has ever lost weight by watching a fitness video. Nor has anybody ever solved their life by listening to a guru podcast.

Forget the hustles, motivational speakers and gurus. The way to get ahead is to literally put yourself ahead through action on your goals.

Final Thoughts

This has become a leviathan of diatribe. I apologise. The key take aways are this:

• The world isn’t perfect. That’s not your fault. Don’t think for a minute that it is.
• The world isn’t perfect. You can only act on this information and use it to your practical advantage.
• Don’t waste time screaming into thin air trying to change the above. It won’t work.
• Instead, get on with the things you can fix.
• Do this by inward motivation, not outward motivation.
• Don’t let someone else be your source of motivation.
• Instead, get initial motivation by finding the right goals for you.
• Carry on with the momentum gained above by achieving landmark goals

The above is a blueprint for generating lasting motivation that requires no external help. It also takes into account the less-than-perfect landscape that we’re all operating in.

Given enough time, it might well fix the issues that you face as a by-product, but by then it won’t matter to you anyway.