In contrast, rewards for stellar performance are far less than the
potential intensity of court-martial and consist primarily of congrat-
ulatory letters in your service jacket and brightly colored ribbons to
wear on your chest.
Now, a moving-away-from-pain motivation system such as this
tends to work satisfactorily in the military or a large corporate orga-
nization, where there are lots of authority figures to enforce the
rules. However, for entrepreneurs, there is little outside authority.
Thus, it is essential for you to play baseball to develop internally
generated motivation that moves you consistently toward pleasur-
able goals.
Self-motivation is when you are motivated without any outside
influence or stimulation. It occurs when you are emotionally at-
tached to achieving a goal—for example, going on vacation. That is
self-motivation. So how can you become self-motivated to accom-
plish tasks you are not as emotionally attached to?
Here is how I (PL) changed my way of self-motivation. When I
first became interested in the possibility of improving my motiva-
tion, I listened to pep talks by several motivational speakers. Al-
though I felt pumped up and inspired during and shortly after
their presentations, there was no permanent effect. This experi-
ence showed me that moremotivation was not the answer. I began to
explore the possibility of differentmotivation.
First, I realized that it would be important for me to under-
stand how I had been motivating myself. I reviewed how I had
motivated myself to complete projects that had been successful in
the past as well as some that were not. Many people have since
told me that their own motivation strategy is similar to what I had
originally used.
I’ll describe first my original unconsciously developed motiva-
tion strategy and then the new one I now use.
When I got started on any new goal, I was excited and began
moving forward. Soon after the fear of failure set in, but somehow I
got over that. Then after a little while I bumped into obstacles and
got frustrated and angry. Still, somehow I got through them. Next,
as I continued to move forward, lots of distractions appeared.
Somehow I moved past those. Then a combination of fear of suc-
cess and the concern that the results would not be as good as I orig-
inally thought came to my awareness. Yet somehow I got over them
and completed the project. I’ve charted this original motivation
strategy in Figure 4.5.
Changing Your Motivation—From Inconsistent to Unstoppable 49