Motivation

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

Like all emotions, motivation is a physical experience.

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. Wherever motivation is located in the core, founders almost always feel it 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 your motivation can scatter your mind and cause overwhelm or a feeling of stuckness instead of driving your goals forward. Too much motivation can feel like you're pointed downhill but you're over your skis and you'll wreck sooner or later - you need to learn how to balance the felt force of your motivation with your 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 over time as you and your startup continue to grow.

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. This is why it's worth knowing all of what motivates you, and not just what may be the loudest or most obvious to you.

One thing I've noticed across my work with founders is that many of them are motivated by fear without realizing it. On this list, fear shows up as greed, guilt, shame, stress, perfectionism, proving people wrong - and sometimes as loyalty, or as a ceaseless drive toward endless personal growth.

That can be okay. Fear is morally neutral - a natural part of the human experience. But being motivated by fear has downstream consequences, and it's worth recognizing the moments you're being driven by it so you can decide whether it's actually the most helpful motivation - whether it's the cleanest fuel source for the task at hand.

If it isn't - if it feels bad, if it's causing consequences you don't want, or if you'd simply prefer not to organize your life around what you're afraid of - choose another option from this list, connect with it, and go from there.

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 relying on it has consequences for your relationships, communication style, decision-making, and even your 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 - Inspiration and passion are both psychological fuel. Either one can be depleted without being protected by boundaries, and depletion of either leads to burnout - a necessary fuel is gone or waning. Both passion and inspiration can be replenished through recurring touchpoints between the founder and the source of their inspiration. For example, 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 because this restores their inspiration and therefore, their energy for their startup.

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

• Passion - Passion behaves like inspiration, and depletes the same way. See above.

• 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 - fear that they'll lose their job, fail at their role, or even lose their sense of self if they aren't constantly growing. In this case, 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. Founders simply run out of steam when they rely on this as their motivation.

• Purpose

• 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 way startup founders internalize overwhelm and uncertainty. Founders can use this discomfort as activation energy - to escape the uncomfortable feelings, they leap to action instead.

• Time, i.e. working toward deadlines. Like novelty, 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. 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.

Connect with your motivation

Once you've found yourself somewhere on this list, spend a few minutes with it.

What motivates you? What are all of your motivations - not just the one you'd say out loud? Which one is loudest right now? Has that changed since you started your startup? How?

Are you running on fear right now? Would you admit it if you were? Is that okay, or is it causing consequences you should be aware of - to your relationships, your communication style, your health?

Then get familiar with how your motivation actually feels in your body.

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 do you feel your motivation? What sensations do you feel? What is your motivation calling for your body and your mind to do? What makes it easy or hard to listen? What else do you notice about yourself or this moment that generated your motivation - where are you, what are you doing, who's around?

Do your best to familiarize yourself with your body's 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.

What motivates your cofounders?

Schedule time to talk with your cofounder about what motivates each of you - there's a question set below that can guide the conversation. You don't need to prepare, you don't ned much time, and you don't need to get through everything - discuss the questions that resonate and skip the rest.

The goal of this conversation isn't to discover that you're motivated by the same things. You probably aren't, and you don't need to be. Instead, the goal is to discover what's actually fueling the person you're building with, so that when one of you runs dry, you can make adjustments as a team that keep everyone connected to their inner fuel.

To start:

What's motivating you today/this week?

What's motivating you in the long-term? What are you driving toward?

When was the last time you saw me genuinely energized? What was I doing? How did it feel for you to witness that?

To check what you assume about each other:

Guess what motivates me. I'll tell you how close you got. Then we'll switch.

Which of my motivations have you never heard me say out loud?

Where do our motivations overlap, and where do they diverge? What does that difference make possible that neither of us could do alone? How does that cause friction?

On what happens when it runs out:

Have you ever seen me running on fear? What did it look like from where you were sitting?

When I lose motivation, what does that look like from the outside? What should you watch for?

The next time you see that in me, I'd like you to… (name something specific).

And here's what I can commit to, for myself… (name something specific).