MBA2481 How To Stay Motivated Everyday

0:09Heyo, welcome to the$100 MBA show where we help you get better at business with our practical business lessons. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher, Omar Zinhome. And in today's episode, you will learn how to stay motivated every day. I get asked this question a lot. Omar, how do you motivate yourself? How do you stay motivated to do what you do day in and day out as you grow your businesses? And what we're really talking about here is how do you have the energy day after day to do what you need to do to be successful? We're not talking about how to motivate yourself out of a slump or maybe a difficult time in business.

0:47We've talked about this in a previous episode, but I'm talking about how do you make sure that you are consistently motivated to do the work that you need to pull off for your business to go where it needs to go, to reach the heights that you dream of. And I'll be honest with you. When I first got asked this question when I was on stage about six or seven years ago, I didn't really understand it. I was like either you want it or you don't. If you want it, you be motivated. And over the years of talking to other entrepreneurs, of talking to other people that are in the grind, I started to realize what they actually mean and what the problem is.

1:25So in today's lesson, I'm going to break it down. What causes a lack of motivation? How to tap into something inside you so that you can continue to be motivated because external motivation is not enough? And how to keep that fuel burning so that when you're feeling tired or maybe you've been working on something for a very long time, kind of getting bored or comfortable, how do you fight through that? Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. When preparing for this episode, I really took a deep dive in thinking about and researching what really motivates people to do anything, really, to lose weight, to make a change in their life, to find love, to save enough for a house, to buy a Lamborghini, whatever it might be.

2:08What motivates somebody to do anything really? And then I also looked into what keeps people motivated, right? Because if you're motivated to achieve something, you're going to achieve it eventually. And then what? How do you stay motivated? And let me just start by saying that most of the people that ask me this question, how do you stay motivated every day? When I get to know them a little bit and understand their situation, the truth is, is that they are comfortable, that they actually don't need to do what they need to do, right? They don't need to start a business because maybe they're in a financial situation where their needs are met, you know, their financial needs are taken care of.

2:48And this doesn't mean like they've inherited money or their family's rich. It could also mean that they're just in a good job that pays them a good salary and they're comfortable. Maybe they're not rolling in the dough and, you know, diving into a vault of gold coins like Scrooge McDuck or even buying a new car every few years. But their basic needs are met. They can live comfortably. They eat well. Most of their needs and some of their wants are taken care of. And it's hard to break out of that when you're comfortable and you don't have any other reason to do it. You know, if somebody needs to get out of a bad situation, somebody needs to get out of poverty or get out of a bad neighborhood or want some better things than they had when they were growing up.

3:34That is a different motivation. So I need to just first say that I need to talk about that because some people are comfortable and that internal drive of like, I got to do this. I have no other choice isn't there. And that kind of addresses kind of the reason why I was kind of confused because I've always had that drive. You know, I grew up in an immigrant household. My parents are Egyptian. They moved to the US. we grew up I would say lower middle class we lived in a safe neighborhood I went to a decent school public school my parents both worked full-time to give us a good life and a good education and live in a safe neighborhood but I worked a job you know part-time from the age of 13 if ever wanted to buy something or have something that is not a essential item like clothes or food let's say for example I wanted to buy I don't know a video game system my parents wouldn't buy it for me because it's just a waste of money in their head.

4:26Like, why are you buying this thing? It's not essential. I would have to go to work and earn my own money and my parents would be okay with me buying whatever I bought with my own money, as long as it was safe and not harmful. That's where I came from. Like, that's the world I came from. I didn't have luxuries in life. I didn't have disposable income. I didn't have an allowance. So, I have a part of me that wants abundance, right? I want to be able to spend on myself and not worry about, you know, feeling guilty about having the nicer things in life. So a part of my motivation is that. But eventually, you're going to get a point in your life and your success in business where you're comfortable, right?

5:05You are comfortable, things are going well, and you are able to enjoy the nicer things in life and travel and be able to dine and find restaurants and just have that kind of life you've always wanted. And then it's easy to ease back and be like, okay, no reason to push so hard and motivate myself. And this is where it's so important to have purpose. Purpose is everything. Why you do anything. And everybody's purpose can be different. And your purpose is really what drives you in life. It's really what makes you get up every morning and go to work and be a productive person in the world, right?

5:42Some people, their motivation is providing a better life for their kids. That's why they do it. They do it for their kids. And they love the role of almost being a sacrificial lamb. I will sacrifice. I will grind it out so my kids can get a better education, so my kids can have the nicer things in life, so they can have a nice clothes and a nice car and all that kind of stuff and provide a lifestyle for my family, for my significant other, whatever it might be, right? That could be somebody's purpose. And that's solid. I'm not going to knock on that, but I will say that at some point in your life, you're going to reach a point where you feel like you're empty.

6:16Like, what about me? What about my fulfillment? And this is where you have to dig deeper. You know, I say that it's really a bad idea to try to seek motivation externally. Like, oh, I'm not motivated. Let me try to watch an motivational video or movie and that'll get me going. That's not sustainable. You can't do that every day. You're going to be able to, you got to get to work and make things happen. But also, I put in the bucket of external motivation, you know, doing things for other people, right? That's good and it's strong, but it's not bulletproof. Like you can continue to maybe work and try to build an incredible business so that you can take your profits and donate to a charity that you love.

6:56And that's your purpose. That's your drive. You're doing it for, you know, the children trying to help. You're doing it for the cause of saving the earth, whatever it might be. And that's good. And that's stronger than having no purpose, but real bulletproof purpose is because it's something you got to do, something that you have to fulfill, something you feel like is your calling, okay? And this is something that takes a bit of soul searching because once you got it, it's like unlimited energy, unlimited energy that you can tap into at any point. And it may seem like you're doing it for others, but really you're doing it for yourself.

7:32Let me give you an example. My example, this is why I do what I do. This is why I run the$100 MBA show. This is why we have this whole brand, the$100 MBA. I do this because for most of my life growing up and even a good portion of my adult life, I did not live in financial abundance. I live in a scarcity mindset where there's so much I can't do because of financial constraints. I couldn't maybe take that online course or get coached or trained because I didn't have the money. I couldn't invest in my health and well-being because some of that takes money. Yes, you can exercise by taking a jog, but it's much harder than when you have money.

8:15I couldn't have a global perspective by traveling the world because of financial constraints. You get the point. And I feel like when you solve the financial equation of your life, meaning that you have built a business and a financial model for your life to be able to have income coming in, cash flow that allows you to fund a more fuller life that allows you to do everything possible. It allows you to reach your full potential. I don't believe we all can reach our full potential until we have that ability to do anything we want or solve any problem that money can solve. And this is why I do the 100 LBA.

8:55It's very, very deeply rooted inside who I am and what I've been through in my life. And I believe that I want to provide the ability for people to start a business so they can have that financial freedom and reach their full potential. Now, this sounds like I want to do this because I'm a great guy and I want to help other people. And that's true. I do want to help other people. I want to impact the world in a greater place. But the reason why I want to do that is because I believe it's a significant thing that I can do on earth, right? In the time I have here above ground. At the end of the day, I'm doing it for myself, really.

9:31I got to admit that there is a selfish element to it. Yes, the impact of that, the byproduct of that is that, you know, lots of people will be improved. A lot of people, you know, thousands of people who listen to this podcast and hopefully millions by the end of my time are going to be impacted by my message and what I teach. And I love that. But deep inside me, I have something that makes me feel I want to do something significant in the world. I want to leave a legacy. And this is my calling. This is what I want to do. This is how I think I can do that in the best way possible. So I believe in order for you to be motivated to do everything, you got to be able to go back to something and say, yes, this is why I'm doing this.

10:11This is ultimately why I'm doing this. Because for me, the pain of, and this is my personal thing and everybody's going to be different. Your thing might be different. So my personal thing is that the pain of not leaving a legacy, the pain of not doing something significant in the world by, you know, following my calling is greater than not doing it. So meaning when I don't feel like doing something, when I'm tired, when I'm down, when it's just been so many days in a row, I can think about the loss of that legacy or the damage that legacy. And to me, I don't want that to happen so badly that I will grind it through and make it happen and stay motivated.

10:51So that's how I believe staying motivated every day works. I want to share a story on how this all plays out in real life. Remember, my purpose, my goal, my reason, my motivation is to help other people solve their financial problems by having a successful business by having that financial freedom so they can reach their full potential. Okay? About a year ago when I was running Webinar Ninja, we were doing massive amount of work and updates and software improvements. And this is typical for a software company, but this particular time we were really trying to create an incredible, incredible feature set in a sister product called Course Ninja.

11:32I get up in the morning during this time, it's around 6 a.m. and my phone is filled with messages from my team, from, you know, the automation that we send out. So I have an alert when something's going wrong. There's emails coming in. There's text messages coming in. I don't even know which message to read first. It's so overwhelming, right? It's so stressful, but I get myself out of bed. I wash my face. I brush my teeth. I kind of just give myself a few minutes to wake up so I can make sound decisions. I first look at my messages from my team and realize, oh, okay, we had a bit of an outage for eight minutes, which was unfortunately something that happens when you host on like AWS, Amazon servers.

12:15Sometimes they go down. This is why when you see Instagram going down or whatever, you know, it's because we're all kind of on the cloud. But regardless, this affects our customers. And we ran a webinar software. People are running live webinars. They can't have any interruption of service, right? On top of that, we were pushing code during that time. So we had to roll back the code because some of the push to production or push to the servers kind of got interrupted when we had the outage and go back to the last stable version of the software. Now, this is not a big deal in software world because rolling back for the user usually doesn't mean much of a difference.

12:52These are fixes and issues and things that we do in the background and nothing really is noticed. But it had to be done quickly because half written code is not good for the experience. So we had to roll back quickly. On top of that, I had to talk to the customer service team to see how we're gonna address the issue of the outage, make sure our team knows how to handle it, how to talk to customers, how we can make sure that this doesn't happen or give them a warning when it does happen. At the same time, one of my team members is asking for leave. I gotta deal with that person and say, hey, talk to this person in HR to help you out.

13:25I'm getting messages from personal friends who use my software asking me, is everything okay? I'm just, it's a three ring circus, right? How do I stay positive? How do I stay motivated? Well, I know that by solving these problems, by staying calm, by having a plan of action, by addressing these things one by one, I fulfill my purpose. I continue to move forward with my goal, right? Despite the bumps. And this is going to happen. It doesn't matter if you have a software company, a content company, an e-commerce brand, you're selling jars of honey at the flea market. It doesn't matter. Business is like life.

14:00You're going to have hiccups. You're going to have challenges. You're going to have curveballs your way. So the best thing you can do in this situation is to remember your purpose, to stay motivated. There's going to be scenarios that are the opposite where there's nothing wrong happening. You have no challenges. Actually, things are pretty boring and things are going pretty smoothly and you're getting comfortable. This is where you have to tap back into your purpose again and say, hey, how can I level up my game and put a little challenge in my life? How can I change things up for the better and push myself outside my comfort zone and take things to the next level?

14:37So in a nutshell, this is not something that you're going to discover overnight. It's going to take some time for you to reflect, maybe even journal in the morning for the next couple of weeks and just ponder on what I just talked about. What is your purpose? Why are you doing this in the first place? What really is going to motivate you to keep doing this for the next 20, 30, 40 years? Is that purpose strong enough for you to stay motivated or do you need to find something else? Because I could tell you firsthand that I had different financial goals, life goals, and once I reached them, you know, it's great.

15:11It feels amazing. But in a few days, you start to say, well, then what? Okay, what now? So you want to find something that drives you to action every day. Thanks so much for listening to The 100 Lombia Show. If you loved today's episode, if you love this podcast, if we've helped you in any way in the course of our last 2 ,400 episodes, the best way you can say thank you is by following the show, by hitting subscribe on your favorite podcast app, whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcasts. Following the show tells the algorithm, hey, the show's great, and I love more of it. This allows us to get more exposure.

15:46It pushes the show to get more audience members and the bigger the show gets, the more we invest in making it better and better. And we got some big things coming up showing you how we're reinvesting in this show. Can't wait to share with you some of that real soon. Thank you in advance for doing that. Before I go, I wanna leave you with this. Wanting something bad enough really is a motivator, but keep in mind what you want will change because you change. As you grow as an entrepreneur, you start to realize, oh, I don't really want that anymore. So for example, you might be like, hey, I want a million dollars in the bank.

16:22And then you finally reach that million dollars in the bank and it's great and you're happy you have it. But in the course of pursuing that, in the course of achieving that, you become something new. You change as a person. You realize, okay, it's actually great to have money and I want more money. But really what I want to do is have more impact. Or what I really want to do is I want to have more work-life balance. I want to spend more time with my family. How do I achieve the same results in less time? So understand that these milestones are great and they're good, but keep in mind that you will change in that process and what you want and what motivates you will change as well.

16:58Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in the next episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

17:12Thank you.