7 Easy Ways for Entrepreneurs to Boost Motivation Every Day

JANUARY 27, 2016, 9:46 AM EST

Here are some effective daily motivational practices.

This piece was originally published on Entrepreneur.

In my years as an entrepreneur, author and business advisor, I have seen others fail and had countless failures of my own. I have stayed up endless late nights working on a new project, only to rip it apart and start all over again. I’ve heard “no” more times than I can count. But through all of the trials and tribulations of being my own boss, I have learned one important lesson: staying motivated is a daily choice.

Though difficult, your success depends on training your mind to see the excitement and good in your daily work. Focusing on the negative causes stress, anger and worry that wear you down mentally and physically with dire consequences: heart disease, chronic anxiety and heated outbursts with your friends and family.

When you see the excitement and the positivity in the mundane you recognize you have a life that you can be proud of. Then you are excited to attack! Here are seven daily motivational practices I’ve found that are sure to bring you success.

1. Stay clear about your path.

Honestly, if you aren’t on point with what your overarching goals are, you will end up lost and floundering. The best way to stay motivated is to know exactly where you are going, and how you’re going to get there. Reaffirm your endgame every day by posting your goals where you can see them. Break your goals down into smaller steps that can be accomplished and celebrated. What you want to accomplish should be clear, prominent and give you the energy to keep going every day.

2. Keep affirmations where you can see them.

It’s so easy as an entrepreneur to get sucked into feeling exhausted or frustrated, and often the blame is yours alone. But a negative mindset sucks up mental bandwidth and energy that you need to stay focused and successful. It is crucial to maintain an optimistic attitude in the face of setbacks. Whenever you see a quote or a picture that helps you stay positive, place it front and center so you can remember what this journey is all about.

3. Remember the grind you left behind.

When you are tempted to drop the weight of self-employment, when reporting to a boss sounds so much easier than doing what you’ve chosen, remember the reason why you are in business for yourself. Remember why you chose entrepreneurship: when you were beholden to someone else it kept you from expanding and reaching the heights of your talents and creativity. If you have to, make time to visit your friends in their 9-to-5 offices so you can remember just what you’re “missing.”

4. Think about others first.

The best way to find motivation in any situation is to stop thinking about how you can better yourself, and start thinking about how you can better the world around you. Set a goal to motivate one person (or more) each day. Expand your goals to include improving your community, your family — anyone except yourself — and you will start seeing the world in macro, rather than micro, which gives everything you do new meaning.

5. Start each day anew.

When you open your eyes in the morning, meet the day without the baggage from the previous day. Mistakes have been made, things have gone wrong. That’s life. The difference between a successful business owner and one who fails is that successful entrepreneurs train their minds through repetition to keep a progressive, inquisitive mindset. Setbacks can be opportunities, and failures can be lessons. It’s all up to how you look at it.

6. Set up effortless feedback channels.

Customer feedback is crucial. It can help eliminate the negatives in a growing business, which makes your product and company stronger. But in addition, feedback channels can also provide welcome and surprising confirmation from customers who are very happy with what you have been doing. Everyone needs that extra boost from time to time, so make it easy to receive.

Here’s Where Too Many Startups Go Wrong

COMMENTARY by
Andy Lark

JANUARY 27, 2016, 8:00 PM EST

Just because you’ve raised capital doesn’t mean you’ll succeed.

The Entrepreneur Insider network is an online community where the most thoughtful and influential people in America’s startup scene contribute answers to timely questions about entrepreneurship and careers. Today’s answer to the question “How do you know it’s time to drop your startup idea?” is written by Andy Lark, CMO of Xero.

Startups fail. It’s a given. Create enough of them and you’ll experience all of the things you’d rather not experience, but that all comes with failing fast, failing slow, and failing to know when to stop failing.

Some outlets quote startup failure rates at well over 50%. And while it’s almost impossible to measure, many founders forge ahead long after they should’ve shuttered, learned from the experience, and moved on.

Pushing on for longer than you probably should has a lot to do with the psyche of a founder. Good founders and entrepreneurs never give up on their ideas. They park them, pivot them, and push them into other concepts. They are continuously reappraising their businesses.

So when should you just drop the idea and get on with something else? There are several points in a startup’s lifecycle that entrepreneurs will have to make this tough decision, which is most often centered around product-market fit—or lack of it.

You can’t raise the right sort of capital
It can take years to build a startup, and without funding, it’s often done between other paying ventures or on the back of sweat capital. However, many founders will find themselves in a position where they require capital to scale to seize the market opportunity.

If you’re unable to secure that growth funding, you risk being one of the hundreds of small players in your particular category, while the company that invests for growth rises to be the giant. That might make for a fun little business, but not something that meets your aspirations.

Startups need to raise capital that reflects the ambitions of the business. If you’ve spent a year trying to get funding and haven’t, you risk looking stale to investors. It’s also an indicator that either the idea’s not compelling or you’re not compelling. People invest in teams and ideas, so it’s important to figure out which one is weighing you down. If the idea gets people excited, then it may mean it’s you. If that’s the case, go find a partner who can do the parts of the business that you can’t. The people problem is usually easier fixed than the idea one.

And just because you’ve raised capital doesn’t mean you are going to succeed. Plenty of us have invested in startups that failed.

You built the wrong product
I’ve seen it time and time again: Startup founders exhaust their capital, energy, and time building a product for a market that doesn’t exist. They haven’t actually gone out to test if the solution they’re building fits a need or solves a pain point for a large part of the market. Inspired by a few keen customers early on, they’ve plowed on without adapting to what the majority need.

For a startup, building a product that lacks market fit can rack up such a significant level of technical debt that the founder has no other choice but to drop the venture and move on.

You can’t attract the right customer
Many startups experience a slight uplift in momentum when they find their set of early adopter customers. But it doesn’t mean the road is paved with gold. For a startup to push on, it needs to find that next wave of customers in a timely and cost-efficient manner.

There can be a real issue around attracting the right kind of customers in volumes large enough to sustain the business. Unless you can acquire that next group of users—the later adopters—you may need to consider dropping your idea, reappraising the product, and regrouping. Many founders discover they went to market with the wrong product, the wrong offer, or a combination of the two.

You can’t secure the right talent
If you can’t rally the right people around your idea, this can be a major warning sign. Either the idea or the founders aren’t energizing enough. And while it may not be reason enough to drop your startup ambitions, it is a reason to reevaluate whether the idea is compelling enough, if it has product-market fit, and if the technology is available to execute on it. Great ideas attract great talent.

You’re no longer motivated
The motivation side of business is often looked upon lightly. However, having the gumption and willpower to execute against massive odds of failure require energy, belief, and a willingness to get out of bed every morning to solve the issue or reach your goals.

Lacking this energy means you’re probably not in the right mindset to go through the peaks and troughs of establishing a growth company. For many entrepreneurs, this moment comes when they realize that scaling the business to meet their mission just isn’t a viable prospect, and that’s the time to reappraise what you’re doing.

Andy Lark, CMO of Xero

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Facebook Doesn't Think About Making Money the Way Most Companies Do

by
Erin Griffith

@eringriffith

JANUARY 27, 2016, 7:57 PM EST

Mark Zuckerberg breaks it down for investors

Like many Silicon Valley companies, Facebook FB 5.52% is a “mission-driven” organization.

Sure, its revenue grows like crazy every year (52% in 2015) and its profits are downright impressive (44% operating margins), but really, executives will stress, this company is about making the world more open and connected. Listen to enough Facebook earnings calls and that phrase becomes deeply lodged in your brain. Hang around Facebook executives enough, and you’ll learn that cynical business questions about money are best phrased in terms of “user experience” and the mission.

In Facebook’s year-end earnings call, held Wednesday night, Zuckerberg closed his prepared remarks with some high-minded mission talk about how his newborn daughter has made him think about the legacy his company will leave to the next generation. “If we continue to focus on solving the fundamental challenges facing the world, and bringing the world closer together, we can leave a better world for the next generation,” he proclaimed.

I’m guessing the analysts heard that and thought: “Sure, whatever you want. Just keep growing revenue by 52% with 44% margins and we’ll keep trading your stock up.”

But toward the end of the call, an analyst made the business question mistake. He referred to a “billion-dollar conversation” that Zuckerberg had had years ago with Facebook’s engineers about the company’s slow shift to mobile. With that in mind, the analyst asked, has Zuckerberg had that conversation about Facebook’s messaging platforms, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger?

For more about Facebook, watch:

The question set Zuckerberg off on a long, corrective explanation that can double as a helpful look into how Facebook thinks about making money from its popular Internet services. It also shows how Facebook went from falling behind in mobile to making 80% of its revenue there and coming to dominate the category.

The short version is “Mission trumps money” at Facebook. (Lucky the company so far, the money has been pretty good.) Here’s Zuckerberg’s answer:

I think you have it wrong. I don’t know where you got that story from. I never had a conversation with the engineering team, where we were behind on mobile and I said, “We need to do this to make money.” That’s not really how we operate.

What happened was we realized mobile was growing faster than desktop and people were shifting their usage. It was the more important thing for people’s consumer experience. That’s when we made the shift. Not in our business first, but in how we developed the products.

I told all of our product teams, when they come in for reviews: “Come in with mobile. If you come in and try to show me a desktop product, I’m going to kick you out. You have to come in and show me a mobile product.” That was a crude leadership tactic—somewhat effective—in helping to motivate the organization to shift its energy toward focusing on mobile.

But if you remember, we actually went through a tough period where our mobile experience was not as good as we wanted it to be and we had no ads on mobile. We prioritized making the experience good before putting ads in.

That’s how we think about messaging. We know messaging is going to be increasingly important. That’s why we hired David Marcus [Facebook’s vice president of messaging products]… and why we bought WhatsApp.

We have a formula for how we build these businesses: First you build a great consumer experience that helps people share in a new way. That’s really important. Then, after that, you can start to introduce organic ways that people can interact with businesses.

So far, this strategy has worked well for ads on Facebook. It has also worked well for video, which is beginning to make money from ads, and for Instagram, which analysts predict will bring in over $3 billion in revenue this year. Soon Facebook will begin to make money from Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp, which have a respective 800 million and 1 billion monthly active users. As roundabout as it may seem, if Facebook’s mission-driven approach works—the proof is in the profits.

Facebook CEO Mark ZuckerbergJustin Sullivan Getty Images

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