The Power of Light Motivation Matter
Entrepreneurs are some of the most confident, headstrong, and insecure people I know. And because entrepreneurship is often very lonely, it can be easy to fall into a trap of listening to the talk track in your head, and using the negativity that arises from there to fuel you.
Over time, that will burn you out and you will fail. Instead, it’s far healthier to use what business author Jim Collins calls light motivation matter. In short, center your passion for your company and your desire to help people. Let those things drive you day in and day out.
I’ve found that cognitive behavioral therapy is extremely helpful in slowing down the negative thoughts and holding them up to Socratic reasoning. I might wake up in the morning driven by dark motivational matter, and tell myself, “The Hub is going to fail,” and any number of negative thoughts. But by holding this flurry of thoughts up to the light, and through a filter of, “Is this really true?” I remember that a lot of the things that I’m telling myself are wrong and inaccurate. I start to filter out some of the fraudulent claims that aren’t serving any purpose other than pushing me forward in a negative way.
There is a cliché that I often consider, that you have to love yourself before you love someone else. People have said that with respect to romantic relationships, but it's also true with respect to a company. When I was operating from a place of dark motivational matter, I didn't love myself, I thought I wasn't enough, and I believed a lot of the perceived negativity that I took in throughout my childhood. It was only through doing a lot of personal work like therapy that I was able to appreciate and love myself more, and I was then able to appreciate my company more. Being healthier and happier as a person and more content with myself, enabled me to be more content with my company.
It was also easier to maintain a shift to light motivational matter now that my company is out in the world. For a long time, The Hub was just a series of big ideas in my head. You play off all kinds of mind games when your company is only in your head. Is it brilliant? Is it completely fraudulent? But when it actually makes it into the world, you get real data that can inform those questions in a tangible way. I often hear stories from the creators on our platform about how The Hub is really helping people — they trust and value us, and our software is bringing them stability, purpose, and financial security. It’s reassuring that my company is doing good things in the world, and if I just keep doing what I'm doing, I'm really helping people.
That was like a big moment where I realized, I’m building something really beautiful and I should be proud of it. I'm not such a fraud or such a failure after all.
As you move from dark motivational matter to light motivational matter, it’s vital to take a good, honest look at yourself and figure out what you're good at, what you're bad at, and either learn to be more okay with that or change it. You should also do the same for the company, and look at it with as much pragmatism and honesty as you possibly can. Try to strip out unnecessary, negative self-talk and delusional passion alike, When you can accept this very clear, pragmatic view, you can work on accepting it and moving forward with a more even-keeled acknowledgement of how your company is failing and how it's succeeding. You don’t need to synthesize negativity in order to trick yourself into working harder, nor do you need to synthesize passion. Operate from a space of practicality.
In other words, find a balance. It doesn’t matter if you're one hundred percent dark motivational matter or one hundred percent light motivational matter: Either way, you lose. I know people that are completely dark and they continually beat themselves up, often to a point of inaction. They usually have an idea and second guess it to the point where they never have the confidence to put things into motion. This doesn’t work, because failure is such a big part of entrepreneurship. It’s a rite of passage, and you need to be able to fail a little bit and recalibrate as you go. You will never succeed otherwise.
Similarly, however, people that are only either cocky or passionate will often have no concept of what they need to do to run a profitable business. It might be that someone doesn't really care if they make money doing their work, or that their business is just something that they love doing. You will get taken advantage of, or you might make decisions that are imprudent from the perspective of business fundamentals. You need to doubt yourself. You need to be skeptical. You need to be careful. You need to look down all these conditional rabbit holes and try them and pull back and reassess.
Right now, I’m operating from a place that is maybe 70 percent light matter, and 30 percent dark matter, and that's a pretty healthy balance. I want to doubt myself and be afraid of failure, because that drives me and not only does it keep me honest, but it keeps me human. That said, I still want most of what's driving me to be passion and love of what I do — an excitedness to reach the next level and to learn and grow and adapt and meet new people. I want to better myself, and it’s that yearning for the light material that is moving me along now.
Don’t get me wrong: I still have dark motivational matter driving me each day, and I think that’s actually practical and pragmatic. There are certain hard truths that my company and I need to face each day, and as long as I’m motivated by genuine truths and shortcomings about my company, I'm being pragmatic. The sooner I can address those things, the more I can lean into belief of self, belief of company, and passion for what I'm doing. The sooner you master dark motivational matter, the sooner you can do tangible good for the people around you, and the world at large.