Your Motivations: Why You Need to “Live and Breath” Them As an Online Entrepreneur

Posted by admin on Thursday, July 21, 2011 · 62 Comments

Hey Deadbeats!

I’ve talked a lot about discovering your true motivations in the past but since this is what I consider one of the most important mental foundations of an online business, it’s time to drill the concept in even more.

I’ll start off by asking you a simple question:

What was/is your motivation when you first decided you wanted to start your own online business?

Most likely your first response would be “to make a lot of money online”.

This is what I consider a “crude” motivation. A crude motivation is something that is driven entirely by simple emotions like greed – Greed is your motivation to make money online.
If this sounds like you, It’s OK. Mostly everyone starts out with this motivation. However, to make a successful run at this business, you need to evolve your motivations, so to speak.

Why Developing Higher Level Motivations is So Important…

I can tell you this with 100% certainty because it’s happened to me before, and to hundreds of students that I’ve taught before:

If your only motivation for starting your online business is to “make a lot of money”, you will eventually fail.

Why? Well two reasons:

It can be awhile before you start “making a lot of money”, or even anywhere near close to what you may consider a respectable income online. If your only motivation is that of greed, your motivational fire will extinguish before you make it to your goal. There’s a lot of ups and downs (more downs then ups) when you first start out, and a simple motivation like greed is not enough to keep your going during these rough patches. And if greed is your only motivation at this time, most likely you are in denial right now even while you are reading this. If you don’t believe me here… that’s fine. You’ll see what I mean soon enough.
Reason number two is once you obtain your goal of “making a lot of money”, you’ve now lost your only motivation to continue to push your business forward. I’ve experienced this before. I built up a very successful online business, and as soon as a reached a certain income level my interest and motivation in my business plummeted. My spark had burnt out – and slowly but surely my income levels dropped. And unfortunately since my motivation was now gone, I had no inspiration left in me to keep pushing forward.

How To Evolve Your Motivations To a Higher Level

Instead of focusing on the money, focus your motivations towards what that money can do for you. For example:

Make a lot of money so you can spend more time with your family
Make a lot of money so you can provide your family with security.

That way your motivation is driven by love for your family and not something material like money. You can take it even further…

Here are my main motivations that drive my business right now:

To escape the trap of the American dream – go to school, obtain massive debt, and be forced into working a mediocre job that sucks away my dreams and ambitions every day is not my cup of tea.
To prove my friends wrong – those who said I couldn’t make a successful business again and that the reason my first business was successful was because I was lucky.
To make a major positive impact on the world – this is one of my major motivators to keep pushing my businesses forward. I know it’s one of those idealistic dreams of young people, but for me it is a dream that I am actively pursuing and know that it’s only a matter of time before it happens, as long as I have the motivation to back it up!
Self improvement: improve my communicative and social skills – I’m very introverted and shy by nature and have been using my business to improve this aspect of my life. I’m forced to do certain things that I normally wouldn’t be comfortable with. As I become better at this stuff, it becomes more and more fun. Now it’s a big factor of why I push my business forward.
For respect – I don’t want a boss that I have to bow down to. I am 100% motivated to insure that I never have to work for anyone in my life (unless I want to).
The challenge of building something successful – overcoming a challenge is the main reason I love being an entrepreneur. I want to succeed where most people fail.
To become better – improving skills that I am developing has always been a major motivator for me. I don’t mean competition: as in being better than everyone else. I become better for my own personal gratification – I want to become better not for everyone else, but for me.

Those are just a few of my motivations, and they change and evolve all the time. Every different stage I reach in my business my motivations adapt and change. It’s a natural process, but becoming aware of the motivations that will drive you through the goods and the bads is extremely crucial for any entrepreneur.

If I were you, right now I would pick up a piece of paper and list the top 5 motivators that make you want to be in this business… and don’t say “to make a lot of money”