Beware the Dark Motivation Matter Driving You

What is the thing that makes you wake up each morning? Just as importantly, what drives you to get out of bed, and toil day in and day out? A few entrepreneurs might say that it’s a deep passion for what they do, but more of them would probably say it was a fear of failure and a deep-seated insecurity, if they were being honest with themselves. I know because for a long time, I was one of them. Sometimes, I still am.

I recently heard this phenomenon of being driven by fear of failure described as dark motivation matter by a man named Jim Collins, who wrote “Good to Great,” “Beyond Entrepreneurship,” and a few other seminal business books. The concept basically is that when you're driven to do something, either you're running from something or you're running to something. Usually what you're running from is fear, or a feeling that you're not enough, or concerns about being some sort of a fake. When you're running to something, you’re usually fueled by passion, love of what you do, desire to help others, and connectivity with what you're doing. 

I've been in business almost five years and I'd say the first three or four were almost entirely driven by dark matter. I would send late night Slacks, and I would wake up at 5:00 AM — I seemed like I was really passionate, but in reality, I was just so frantically concerned that my business, The Hub was going to fail. And by extension, that I would fail with it.

It’s not a new feeling. I’ve always felt that I'm not quite enough, whether it was because I was enrolled in a competitive grade school, or then going to a competitive college and working in competitive workplaces. There was always this feeling that whatever my best is, isn't quite good enough and that it's only a matter of time before I'm found out as a fraud. That deep fear of disappointing people, and specifically of disappointing my dad, would drive me each day — I would wake up so desperately wanting to avoid that, at whatever cost. 

Dark motivation matter deteriorates your self-worth and sense of self. If most of the reason why you're doing what you're doing is a deep fear of failure or some sort of imposter syndrome, you're damaging yourself and whatever you’re building, little by little. That it will catch up to you at some point, because as motivating as dark matter can be, it’s simply not sustainable.

I was waking up at 5 AM and my body didn't want to, and I would force myself to drink two or three coffees to hit the day hard and show up for everything. When you’re operating from a place of fear and resistance, you zap your central nervous system and you're on high alert all the time. You have cortisol flooding your mood centers of your brain, and you can do a great deal of damage to your body and brain alike simply from your constant stress.

Something that has been extremely useful to me in the fight against dark motivation matter is therapy: When I work with my therapists, we often focus on slowing down the talk track in my head, that flurry of thoughts that leads me to do something or feel some way. We all have some variation of this feed in our own minds at all times, and if you slow it down and really try to listen, what is each thing that you're saying? For me, my talk track was a constant reminder that I've always been viewed as a creative, impulsive, high energy guy... that can't operate, that can't execute, that doesn't follow the directions, that doesn't fit the box with the norm and therefore won't amount to much. My talk track wanted me to believe that it was just a matter of time before I face-planted. For a long time, I was fueled by an angry, vindictive energy — an “I'm going to show you” energy, if you will — and a determination to make this work through sheer willpower alone. 

I own all of my mistakes in the early years of The Hub and even now, but I know that being driven from such a negative place certainly impacted my decision making. I did a bad job deciding when to take big leaps and when to be conservative. I was constantly worried that spending a lot of money and seeming frivolous would reflect poorly on me, particularly in the eyes of my dad.

For example, when I wanted to build The Hub’s software, an agency quoted me $70,000 for the idea that was in my head, which in retrospect is incredibly cheap. But at the time, I couldn't comprehend that number, so I politely said no and found people overseas to try to keep costs down. I built The Hub’s software for probably $30,000, but I had to burn it to the ground and then spend many hundreds of thousands of dollars to undo the damage and rebuild it better and in the way that it should have been built the first time. That means I spent way more money in the long run because I was so fearful of being viewed a certain way instead of just building it the right way the first time.

There are probably a lot of examples where I didn't have the confidence to take the swing that I should have because I didn't fundamentally believe in myself, which is quite common for entrepreneurs. Of course, some entrepreneurs that are truly cocky. They're not really hiding anything, and if they’re lucky, they’re both incredibly smart and incredibly well-connected. If their idea is good enough, they will overcome the fact that they don’t really check in with or second-guess themselves. Most of these people, however, flame out, because entrepreneurship is a tightrope: You need to be able to check in and access the conditional pathways that lie before you.

That constant checking in requires empathy and conscientiousness, and if you're too bullheaded and cocky, you never do that, but if you're too conscientious and empathetic, and if you're too insecure, then you never have the confidence to take big risks. You need to seek and find a balance of believing in your idea more than you should at points, and being welcoming of criticism and feedback. 

It's only been within the past year that I’ve noticed a shift in how I myself operate. For one, I've become healthier from a mental health perspective, but my company has also entered adolescence. It's actually helping people and is out there in the world, as opposed to simply being an idea spinning around in my brain. Because of this, I’ve been able to operate more from a place of light motivation matter. But for years, I was almost entirely motivated by dark matter, which can be incredibly powerful, but is also very corrosive over time.

I can’t stress how important it is, then, to find a really delicate balance of dark motivation matter and light motivation matter. You need to check yourself, second-guess yourself, and be receptive to criticism, but you also have to wake up every day and fundamentally believe that this is going to work. If you can hold space for both of those and switch between them, you can succeed.