And how we can engineer motivation
I once launched a card game on Kickstarter. A group of friends and I had a blast pulling the content together and writing the rules. We were excited to share it with the world.
However, commercializing a card game is not cheap. Despite overwhelming support, we didn’t reach our goal.
We swore we’d build a bigger social media presence and community and then try again. But we quickly struggled for motivation. I rang my mum.
“You’re just not hungry enough”, she said. A lifelong entrepreneur, she knows what it’s like to be hungry (literally) and to chase down any opportunity because she needs to put food on the table.
“You have a stable job you enjoy and you’re focused on building your career. This is a passion project and it will have no life-changing impact if it goes well or badly. That’s hardly the motivation you need to go the extra mile.”
She’s not wrong. Entrepreneurs work through the small hours on their businesses because they have no choice. Because a team is counting on them. Because there’s no other way to pay the bills.
What does it mean to be hungry? To be hungry is to be motivated to change. To find a way to move forward against all odds.
Paradoxically, if you’re starting from a low point, it can sometimes be easier to aim high. It’s easier to leave your comfort zone when you’re not comfortable in the first place.
There’s a grain of truth in that most famous fable of entrepreneurship: “garage-dwelling graduates build billion dollar business”.
While there is little truth in the output — becoming a unicorn business is as likely as seeing a unicorn (ok, it’s 0.00006% — a little more likely than seeing one.) Society loves to celebrate the truth in the input: start hungry and uncomfortable in your surroundings, and you will be more motivated to change them.
Caveat: this meritocratic vision is flawed. Some of us cannot change our circumstances despite our drive, and the discomfort we experience day-to-day cannot propel us forward.
Those who successfully change their situation may have support, credentials or financial backing behind them in a way others do not. We should all be mindful of the hidden privilege when we hear or tell a sensationalized account of the hungry entrepreneur who goes from ‘rags’ to riches.
Still, when we think practically about entrepreneurship, the concept of equity over salary equates to “skin in the game”.
The delayed gratification and risk of no reward change the decisions founders make day to day. An academic study on this concept discovered that the higher the percentage of personal income invested by the founder, the higher the business’s chance of success.
In my experience, no. A mild appetite for change doesn’t get us anywhere unless the right opportunity lands in our laps. How often does that happen?
We need to dig deep and find the hunger. If we can’t find it, we must artificially create it.
A great example of this is the side hustle. Since the gig economy came along, the side hustle has increasingly gained popularity: right now, 53% of American Gen Zs and 50% of American millennials have a side hustle.
For some who struggle to find satisfaction in their day job, it’s a temporary route to a new and better career path. In this scenario, hunger comes naturally. The side hustle is a temporary state that promises a way out.
But for many, the side hustle is increasingly becoming a way to do other things we enjoy beyond our core professions. We seek to maintain that variety and wouldn’t swap our side hustles for our full-time jobs. Eve Arnold brings this to life with her Part-Time Creator Club.
In this scenario, finding the hunger can be harder, as our day jobs keep us ‘safe’. We need to artificially create the hunger. Here are some strategies from professional side hustlers:
- Awosika Ayodeji suggests you break up your time into 90-day sprints. Thinking about the big picture all the time is incredibly hard. Aiming for a target that’s 5 years away is not enough motivation day-to-day. That’s like denying yourself food for a week and seeing how far you get without a strategy. Instead, focus on what you want to accomplish in the next 90 days and have at it.
- Make it a game. Within these time-boxes, set goals for a game you want to win. Maybe it’s how much money you want to earn, how many new followers you want to gain or a partnership you seek to secure. Keep it interesting and play with different techniques to get there. And if you don’t hit your target, hey, you had a good game.
- Find your why. Why am I doing this? Write the answer on a Post-it somewhere you can see it. Mine is stuck to the front of my journal, so I see it every morning. #Basic, but it works.
How do you find your why? Ask yourself “why” not once but five times. This technique is well-used in customer interviews to uncover your user’s true motivations. Ask me why I write once, and I might say, “because I enjoy it,” ask me five times, and I will tell you it’s because I want to help people unlock their full potential. Uncover your deep-rooted motivation to do what you love and return to it when you need a boost.
This battle should be fought by individuals and their managers in equal measure. So many managers dangle the occasional carrot of a pay rise, bonus or promotion to keep the individual going but fail to offer a path to fulfilling experiences at work.
Sure enough, a fresh carrot is dangled, and we head after it, high on hunger. But just as the promotion / pay rise / bonus is within our grasp, we fall off a cliff edge. What’s next? What am I chasing after now?
The manager is still riding off the high of giving the individual a well-deserved reward, putting them to the bottom of their ‘to do’ list. Meanwhile, the individual feels unfulfilled and doesn’t know where to look for satisfaction: is it worth waiting a whole year for the next carrot?
Both managers and individuals need to ditch the reward-centric approach. It’s up to the individual to find fulfillment directly with the work they do and the manager to light the way.
To help with this, April Rinne encourages us to switch our mindset from career pathways to career portfolios. How will this project you’re working on make a great addition to your career portfolio? Pathways vary widely from company to company, so if you come out of an organization with a clear sense of your pathway and no portfolio, you won’t have much to say in your next interview.
As a venture builder (building startups in partnership with corporate companies), the career portfolio approach aligns with my work. I’ll find an opportunity and build a startup until the seed stage, at which point we will bring on an experienced founder to move the venture forward.
My goal is to get myself and my team a successful venture to add to our ‘career portfolios’; our incentives reflect that. Years later, we hope to look back on our careers as venture builders not as a linear journey to the top but as a portfolio of successful businesses that started as ideas in our heads.
While not all will succeed, the individual journeys of those businesses will make for more compelling stories for future employers / grandkids than success pathways.
How can you divide the elements of your job into a portfolio of experiences? It can be tempting to chase a job title that’s meaningless outside of the organization in which it was invented, but when you take your next step or look back on your career, it’s the impactful experiences that will count. And if we work on giving those experiences our best, the rewards will come naturally.
Sure! There’s not one but three key takeouts to satisfy that craving:
- The most successful artists and entrepreneurs have found their hunger.
- If the hunger doesn’t come naturally, we can engineer it by finding our purpose and time-boxing our work.
- We can sustain lasting hunger to strive for success by focusing on experiences in our career portfolio rather than career pathways.
I’m sure you have your own perspectives on this topic — drop me a comment to share.
Do you agree that hunger is key to success? When have you been hungriest in your life, and how did it help you? Is your side hustle a means to an end or an end in itself?