Pod Insights The $100 MBA Show How To Motivate Yourself To Get Things Done About this episode Feeling stuck even though you know exactly what needs to be done can be one of the most frustrating parts of growing a business. You have the goals, the plan, and the ambition, but when it’s time to take action, somehow everything else feels more appealing. If you've been waiting for motivation to magically appear before making progress, this episode might challenge the way you think about getting things done.
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1:26 Speaker 00 episodes, at least three days a week for the last 12 years. In those 12 years creating over 2,800 episodes, I did not rely on motivation at all. Over 2,800 episodes, never missed one. We're talking sick days, holidays, the hardest years of my business. Days where I woke up and I wanted to do absolutely anything else, right? The episodes still went out. Here's the truth about how those episodes went out. It was not motivation. Motivation doesn't show up 2,800 times in a row. Nothing shows up 2,800 times in a row, except for a system. And today, I want to give you that system.
2:06 Speaker 00 The exact five-step approach I use to get things done, whether I feel like it or not. Because here's the secret that nobody talks about online. And that is that the most productive people that you know, do what they need to do regardless of how they feel. They build something stronger than a feeling. They build a system, a reliable system, one that I'm going to share with you right now. Let's get into it.
2:37 Speaker 00 Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.
2:50 Speaker 00 If this show has helped in any way, it would be amazing if you could drop us a quick review on whatever app you're using to listen to this podcast right now. It helps me and my team bring new episodes every week. And more importantly, more entrepreneurs will be able to discover our podcast, so you can help someone else start their journey. Thanks so much. Step one: Stop waiting to feel like it. The biggest lie about motivation is the order of operations. Most people believe motivation comes first and action comes second. I need to feel motivated so that I can start. So they wait. They wait until they are in the right mood, in the right energy, are feeling the right vibe.
3:33 Speaker 00 They're waiting for that perfect day, that perfect morning where everything aligns, and they feel like doing what they need to do. And that morning, that day rarely comes, because that is not how motivation works. Here is what actually works. Action comes first. Motivation comes second. Motivation is not the cause of action. Motivation is actually the result of it. You get motivated when you take action. Think about the last time you didn't want to go to the gym, okay? You had to drag yourself away from wherever you're doing, watching TV. Maybe you were just lounging in the house, and you had to lace up your shoes and head to the gym. You got to the gym, you started doing the exercises, and 15 minutes in, you start to feel a little bit better.
4:18 Speaker 00 20 minutes in, you're glad that you actually made it. By the time you're 30 minutes into your workout, you're like feeling great about yourself. You're so motivated, and you can't wait to go to the gym tomorrow. See what happens here? The motivation shows up after you start, not before. This is so true, and it's true for almost everything you do, especially things that you have to show up for every single day, like your business, right? The workout was just an example, but this could be sales calls. This could be creating content. This could be having difficult conversations with your team. The project that you're working on, or you've been avoiding working on for months. Starting anything is the hardest part. So I want to give you a practical rule.
5:02 Speaker 00 You need to follow this rule like your life depends on it. In a lot of ways, it does. The life that you want, okay? Never, and I mean never, negotiate with yourself about whether you feel like starting. Just start. You should see the negotiation or the dialogue that you're having with the head of you. Should not do it? Should I do it? You should see that as a signal to take action, like, once you experience that, okay, that means I have to do it. Just start. Take one small step, whether that's opening up a spreadsheet to start budgeting for your next project, and start entering some numbers. Give it five minutes. Give it 10 minutes. In 15 minutes, I'm telling you, you're going to feel better about it. I've found that if after 15 minutes of genuine effort, you still cannot get into it, you have my permission to stop.
5:45 Speaker 00 But I'm telling you, you will be more motivated to continue, because now you're invested, right? You have sunk costs. You have put in some time and effort, and now you're in the flow. So I want to give you an exercise, so that you can get over this hurdle. And here it is. Pick the one task you've been avoiding this week, okay? The one that you kind of never cross off, the thing that is kind of in the too-hard basket. Set a timer for 15 minutes on your watch, on your phone, on your whatever, okay? And start working on it, just for 15 minutes. I don't want you to wait until you feel ready. Just see this as an exercise, even if you don't do this ever again. I want you to just experience this. Give it 15 minutes. Work on that thing that you know is going to take longer than 15 minutes.
6:30 Speaker 00 Maybe it'll take you five hours. It's going to take you five days. But just give it 15 minutes and see how you feel after the 15 minutes. I guarantee you will feel more motivated to continue working on it. You'll feel a lot less intimidated by the task, and you will start to make some headway on something that you've been avoiding for a very long time. Step two: Make the mission bigger than the mood, okay? Here is the problem with relying on how you feel. Feelings are like the weather. They change daily, sometimes hourly, okay? And it's not a reliable source for you to base your actions on. If your work only happens when the weather's good, your feelings are good,
7:12 Speaker 00 your output will be unpredictable as the weather. You're not going to know how much output or when this output would happen. You need something a little bit more consistent. People who produce consistent results that I've found in my space, in business, in life, are not people that are constantly in a good mood. In fact, they are dealing with a lot of challenges in life, in business. And despite those challenges, they are able to produce consistent, good work. They are people who have a reason for working hard and working consistently that is bigger than their mood. This is super important, okay? And if you take anything away from today's lesson, it's this step.
7:56 Speaker 00 When I was building Webinar Ninja, my software company, where our, we had entire seasons where things were just not going well. We were having some really dark days where we were not sure if we were going to be able to sustain the business, let alone grow the business. Costs were rising, competition was closing in, growth was totally flat. The mood on most of those days, you can guess it, was not great, right? I wasn't motivated to keep going. But what kept me working hard was something beyond what I was feeling in the moment. And that is a mission, is something that's deep inside of you. Having people be financially free by growing their businesses through webinars was my mission through Webinar Ninja. Why was that so important to me? Because simply, I know how hard it is to be poor. I grew up in an immigrant family.
8:41 Speaker 00 We were pretty poor. I didn't realize it at the time, growing up, but looking back at it, we were poor. We didn't really buy things from stores. My dad would get things from Goodwill and come home with a big, black garbage bag. And we'd see what's inside the bag, and we would be like, oh, we're so happy to have a jean jacket from 10 years ago, okay? And that was our shopping. And that was how it was. And I didn't think it was something strange at the time, but looking back at it, oh, we were pretty poor. We weren't living it up, okay? Most of my schoolmates and my friends at school had new Air Jordans every single year or every six months. I was buying the clearance rack shoes that were at Marshalls, right? Which is a low-bargain store in the States. But I share this with you, because I know the struggle of being poor.
9:24 Speaker 00 I know my parents really had a hard time with money. I know that the phone would ring, and we would know that on the other side were people trying to reach my parents, because they had things to pay off. And that is not something I like to go back to. That's something that really is painful for me to share, but I share it with you, because I know that that is not a life that is fulfilling, okay? It's very hard for you to reach your potential when you are limited financially. And knowing that so well, it became part of my mission to help other people become financially free, so that not only do I get myself out of that situation, Help other people get through that situation because I know that situation so well. I never forget where I come from because it reminds me of why I'm doing what I'm doing.
10:09 Speaker 00 It's the reason, it's my motivation, it's the thing that gets me over any bad moods. My mood becomes irrelevant once I remind myself of the mission that I'm on. You don't need to ask yourself whether you feel like it anymore. You ask yourself whether the mission still matters to you. And if that mission is strong enough, it's going to push you to go beyond what you're feeling at the moment. So in those dark days where we were trying to grow up in our ninja and we were struggling. And I had to motivate myself to perform on a webinar and to sell our products or services. I knew that even if I can get one person to buy our software, to allow them to run webinars, to sell their products and services so that they could pay their bills, so they could pay their rent, so they can be able to provide for their family and not have to go through what my family had to go through.
10:54 Speaker 00 That was motivation enough for me to get up and hit, uh, start webinar inside the software and get going. So here's a question you need to answer right now because you need an answer to this. Why are you doing this? Not on the surface. Yeah, you want to make money. Yeah, you want to live a better life. Yeah, you want those material things in life, which are all great, fantastic. But what's the real reason behind what you do? Who does your work serve? What does it make possible for those people? What do you do that helps them at a higher level? I want you to write down your answer. Put it on a post-it note, put it on your monitor, put it where you could see it. I had this right down. I wrote down, being poor sucks. I wrote that down in my post-it note, put it on my monitor. Every time I opened my laptop, I saw it.
11:37 Speaker 00 And it was not only a motivation for me to make sure that I make sure I grow my wealth and I never go back to that situation my parents were in. But also it was a motivation for me to help other people to never have to experience that. Cause that pain is real. And I'm actually glad I went through that experience as a young kid growing up. My parents didn't have much because I understand and it can resonate with other people and I can help them. And it helps me help them through having that mission, having that vision of understanding that, hey, this is a problem that needs to be solved. So I want to give you an exercise. Write down one sentence that captures why your work matters beyond the money. Put it on your desk, put it on a post-it note, put it on your monitor. Make it your phone wallpaper.
12:21 Speaker 00 You could even write it with a little marker in your bathroom mirror. So you could see it every morning. Some people like to do that as well. That's totally fine. Read it to yourself every morning. Remind yourself why you're doing what you're doing because you're going to need it. Some days are going to be harder than others and you're going to need that mission on those hard days.
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14:12 Speaker 00 Step three, design your environment to do the work for you. Here's something I learned building my first business while working as a full-time teacher. Willpower is unreliable. Okay. Your environment is essential because you can control your environment. You can make your environment reliable. When I was building my side businesses, I did not try to work from home because home is a place filled with distractions. I'm not just talking about the people that are distracting. I'm talking about the TV, I'm talking about the PlayStation, the bed, the fridge full of food, all the comforts around you. It doesn't work, trust me, all right? So what I did instead is that when I was coming home from work, I would stop by a coworking space.
14:54 Speaker 00 Every Tuesday and every Thursday evening, and even on Saturdays, I would put in a good day's work in that coworking space. And guess what happened in that environment? I worked because the space is made to work, right? Not because I suddenly became some super disciplined person. It's because everybody around me was working, everybody around me was building businesses. There was no TV to turn on, there was no distractions. I just had to sit down and get things done. The lesson here is that you want to make sure you make things easy on yourself. Why are you making this so hard on yourself? Allow the environment to make the decision for you. The environment is going to make it more conducive for you to focus and get things done. This is one of the most underrated productivity tools that exists in my opinion is the environment.
15:39 Speaker 00 If you can't go to a coworking space, go to the library. Find a space that is quiet, that allows you to focus, that has the least amount of distractions possible. Stop trying to overpower the environment. Stop trying to make it super difficult on yourself, okay? Just make it easy by having an environment that makes it easy for you to work. One thing I do if I want to really focus and get something done is I put my phone in another room, right? I just remove all the friction that can possibly get in the way of me accomplishing what I need to get done. The point of step three is that you are intentionally designing an environment that allows you to be productive. You notice that so far in this episode, I'm not talking about, you know, playing some Rocky playlist, okay?
16:22 Speaker 00 Or watching some motivational video to get you pumped, right? This is something that's reliable, that's practical, that you could repeat over and over again. Building the right environment, making sure that you're focused, making sure you have something internal, an internal mission or motivation to get things done. Rather than relying something external to happen for you to be able to produce the work you need to produce. So as an exercise for the step, identify one environmental change that can improve your focus this week. It could be a different location. It could be putting your phone in the drawer. It could be something as specific as shutting off all social media on your desktop, whatever it might be. Make one change, write it down and stick to it for seven days and see how it impacts your behavior and impacts your productivity.
17:08 Speaker 00 Hey, if this episode is giving you some practical steps, a practical system to help you stay focused, then I want you to subscribe to the show because I have an upcoming episode I don't want you to miss. We're going to go deep on how do you choose which business to start? If you're fresh and you're new to business and you're not sure which business idea to go after, which product or service to offer to the world, then you're going to love this episode because it's going to make it super clear on what your first steps are. Hit subscribe so you don't miss that episode. Now the next step is step four, and before I get into step four, I want to ask you an honest question. Do you actually want this? Do you actually want to build this business, change your life, change your lifestyle, whatever it might be? Your reasons behind it? Ask yourself, do you actually really want this? Because if you do, you will find a way to get it done.
17:53 Speaker 00 You will find a way to get focused. And I'm asking you this to kind of give you a little bit of a wake-up call, to get serious, to really commit. Some of us don't want to commit because we're afraid to fail, but you might as well just go for a hundred percent. And when I was starting my career as an entrepreneur, I had to ask myself this question constantly. Do I actually really want this? Because if I don't want this, I might as well just stop trying, okay? But if I really do want it, then I gotta go all out. I gotta play all out. I gotta just really give it my all and allow myself to have a chance to win by focusing. So that's a little side note, it's not one of the steps, but just wanted to get you to ask that question because I had to ask that question myself when I was getting started. Let's get into step four, and that's to gamify the grind.
18:36 Speaker 00 Okay, the truth about getting things done that nobody talks about is that a lot of the most important work you have to do is boring. Follow-up emails, bookkeeping, creating content, sometimes it just gets boring because it's so repetitive. I would say about 80% of what you're going to do every day as a business owner is not very exciting. Okay, it's pretty mediocre, but it all matters. It's important and you need to get it done. And waiting to feel excited about it is not how you get it done. As you mentioned, it's not about your feelings. You need to make sure that you have a strategy. So here's what you do instead. You make growth a game, not the task itself, but the progress that you're on. The mission and the steps that you're on to get to where you want to go in your business. For example, today is Thursday, the day I'm recording this.
19:21 Speaker 00 I have put out on my calendar that I'm going to be recording two episodes today and two episodes tomorrow. If I accomplish that task, I have passed this level. I have moved on to the next level. I have won the week. This is how I gamify. I like to make sure I have goals set up for me so that I can have something to work towards and feel like I've accomplished something. So I feel like I have won at something that I set out to do. Maybe for you, it's something different. Maybe your output's something different, but always challenge yourself to hit a certain mark. And maybe you want to beat last week's output. What happens if the numbers are not going the way you want to go in your business? So say, for example, you have to do five sales calls this week.
20:04 Speaker 00 Well, why don't you try for next week to do 10 sales calls? See if that impacts how many sales you make, right? Because it's a numbers game in business. The more contacts, the more sales calls you make, the more chance you're going to have of making more sales. This is the point I'm trying to make is that you need to gamify this so that you have small incremental goals that work you towards the larger goal. The task itself might be boring. It may not be the most exciting thing you have to do, but the game of it is not, right? Track your numbers, set targets, compete with your previous self, with Omar of last week is what I've tried to do. Am I better than Omar last week? If yes, show me the numbers. What are the numbers look like? And that will allow me to feel like I'm making progress.
20:46 Speaker 00 You need to have some way to track if you're actually making progress or not. And that's why they say Peter Drucker, who's the grandfather of marketing and sales, he says, what gets measured gets managed. So you have to measure so that you can know if you are actually getting better. And I'm here to tell you that sometimes you're going to have to grind it out before you get results. Okay, when we were building our social media presence, we published over 650 pieces of content before we found real traction, when we started getting followers and viewers. Most of that production was very repetitive because we're testing, we're trying new things. We're seeing what works and what doesn't. And what kept me engaged to create all that content was the game of the experiment of seeing what will work
21:29 Speaker 00 and what will not, and how we're going to actually hit the mark. And I'm going to tell you right now, as somebody who's been working on their social media for the last few years, a lot of the stuff that you create is not going to do well, but some things will do well. And that's where you kind of see the game of it. It's like, okay, why did that do well? How can I do more of that? So for me, iteration is the game that I try to pull out of doing things that are very repetitive, right? How can I iterate, experiment, improve what we're doing through those iterations? So you've got to find your version of the game because the person who can make boring work engaging has a superpower because they could do more and more of that work and get better results. And I'm telling you right now, most people don't make it in business because they don't figure this one out.
22:14 Speaker 00 They don't actually gamify the things that are mundane, that are tough to do on a consistent basis. Because at the end of the day, somebody who could withstand the test of time and do things over and over again and get better and better at it, they're the ones that achieve that level of mastery and differentiate themselves from the crowd. So here's your exercise for this step. Pick one reoccurring task you find boring in your regular work each week. And I want you to attach a measurable target to it. Track it visibly, whether it was a spreadsheet or whether it's just paper and pen. For the next two weeks, track it. Watch what happens to your relationship with the task when you're keeping score. I find that when you're keeping score and you're seeing what's happening, you start to get more engaged.
22:57 Speaker 00 You start to feel like, hey, maybe I should do something a little bit different. Maybe I should change something up. How can I improve my results? It's hard for you to know if you're winning if you have no scoreboard. So create yourself a scoreboard so that you could track what's happening and see if you're improving. So I'll give you a quick example for this exercise. Say you are creating short reels for Instagram and right now you're creating three reels a week. Well, what happens if you create six reels a week? How many views are you going to get? Obviously, you're going to get more views because you're creating more reels. Well, what happens when you create more reels is you learn what works and what doesn't work. Are your average views per reel increasing as you're increasing the volume? Well, you won't know until you track it. Okay, so that's just one example of this exercise where you could pick a reoccurring task
23:42 Speaker 00 that you might find a little bit boring and attach a measurable target to it. Step five, get accountability that has some teeth. Okay, and here's the final piece, and it's what makes really a huge difference when you put it all together. You need external accountability. I'm going to tell you something that a lot of people won't say to your face. Business is extremely hard. Most people don't make it. Most people fail. So what you need to do to have the best possible chance of success is for you to line up as much things to your advantage. You want to make sure that you use everything you can possibly to help you be successful. And one of that is accountability, is getting somebody outside or some people. It could be a mastermind group. It could be a community.
24:28 Speaker 00 It could be a loved one in your family that will hold your feet to the fire. And this is not because you're weak. This is because you're smart. This is because you're doing everything you can so that you can increase your likelihood of success. This is because as human beings, we are wired for social accountability. We naturally show up differently when someone is expecting us to show up. Think about it. You will cancel a solo gym session. You know, you have to go to the gym, told yourself, I gotta go to the gym today at 5:00 PM. And 5:00 PM rolls around, you're not feeling it. It's easy for you to cancel on yourself, but if somebody's going to meet you at the gym at 5:00 PM, it's much harder to send that text or give them a call and say, hey, I'm not going to make it. So you just avoid that confrontation and just show up and go to the gym. It's the same workout.
25:13 Speaker 00 It's the same gym, but it's a different structure. You have a completely different way to follow through because now you have somebody outside relying on you to show up. You need to do the same thing in your business, whether it's having an accountability group where every week you have a Zoom call and you ask each other, hey, did you actually fulfill your to-do list for the week? Did you accomplish your goals? Did you hit your numbers? This is a great way, especially in the beginning of your entrepreneurial journey, to hold your feet to the fire, to hold yourself accountable, to have external motivation, to have external accountability. This could be just sharing your goals publicly with your audience on social media, saying, hey, I'm going to launch my product on this date. And guess what? You'll have a lot of motivation to launch on that day and not delay and not push back the deadline because everybody already heard when this is going to happen.
25:57 Speaker 00 And you don't want to sound like you're a wishy-washy person and somebody that doesn't fulfill on your promises. You got some money? Get a coach. Get a coach that could hold your feet to the fire, that could make sure, hold you accountable and make sure that you're doing what you need to do. Find a way to get somebody outside yourself. And this could be simply just telling your roommate, telling your parents, if you're living with your parents, telling your loved one, your significant other, hey, this is what I gotta get done this week. Do you mind if I share with you if I got it done or not at the end of every week? It's simple as that. It takes five minutes. And here's the thing, the moment your commitment becomes visible to somebody else, the cost of quitting changes, becomes really expensive to quit because now you gotta save face. Now you gotta fess up to the fact that you didn't accomplish what you're supposed to accomplish.
26:42 Speaker 00 And you don't have to just deal with yourself. You gotta deal with the reaction of others. So make it harder for yourself to quit. Make it harder on yourself not to do what you're supposed to do. Every consistent output in my career has had some form of accountability or some sort of accountability structure behind it. This podcast, right, has an audience that's expecting an episode every single Monday, Wednesday and Friday. I am conscious of this fact. And this is why I make sure that we produce these episodes in advance so that we're never behind. So we never are late on publishing these episodes. I'm very, very conscious of the fact that not only will I let down myself, but I'll let down an audience, let down my team if I don't show up and do what I need to do. By the way, you can apply this not just to yourself, but to your whole team.
27:27 Speaker 00 One of the best ways to do this is to make sure your team's work is visible to everybody else. So this could be like a progress chart. This could be a Kanban board. This could be something that people could see, okay, this is where I'm supposed to be working. These are the things that are on my plate. This is what I need to do by this time. A deadline, a to-do list, whatever it might be. By having commitments public, it motivates people to do what they need to do. So here's your exercise for this step. I want you to take the most important tasks you're working on this week, and I want you to make it visible to somebody other than yourself. This could be a family member. It could be somebody that's in an accountability group, a Facebook group, whatever it might be. Just make it publicly known to somebody else what you're working on,
28:11 Speaker 00 and ask them if you could circle back with them a week later to check in on how, when. Did you accomplish what you set out to do? How much did you accomplish? What were the results? By just doing that, you're going to move the needle towards you. You're going to be able to not only feel the pressure of disappointing somebody else, but you're also going to feel the pressure to also make sure that you share a win with somebody, could celebrate somebody when you accomplish what you're supposed to accomplish, to move you closer to your goals. So there you have it. I just shared with you my complete system for getting things done, whether you feel like it or not. Okay, so stop waiting to feel like it. It's not going to happen. Action creates motivation. You've got to get into the habit of taking action regardless of how you feel.
28:55 Speaker 00 And when you take action, you will start to feel motivated, not the other way around. Remember, find that mission, that thing that's inside you that will overcome any mood, because your feelings shouldn't be like the weather. Wherever you feel like it or not, you're going to decide your fate based on how you feel. No, that's not how you want to go. You want to have a deep, strong mission that drives you to get up and do what you need to do regardless of how you feel. You want to design your environment around yourself. Make sure you have an environment that is conducive to staying focused. Gamify the grind. Find a way to track what you're doing and make sure that you're making progress, and use those numbers to make you feel motivated that you are making progress. And get some accountability, because when you have accountability,
29:38 Speaker 00 you have somebody outside yourself, or some people outside yourself, that are holding you accountable. But also, you don't want to disappoint them. You want to make sure that you show them that you walk the walk, talk the talk. In my 20 years of entrepreneurship, it all boils down to this: doing what you told yourself you're going to do regardless of how you feel. Keeping your promises to yourself, because when you break promises to yourself, it's a very, very fast way to lose confidence. The opposite is true. You build confidence by actually consistently doing and holding your promises to yourself. Doing what you said you're going to do over and over, proving to yourself that you actually get things done. Use this system to build that confidence. I hope today's episode was helpful. If it was, I highly recommend you check out this next episode
30:23 Speaker 00 that we recently published called "The Five Silent Killers of Success and How to Avoid Them", because being inconsistent is one of those five killers. Okay, but there are other four that you need to know, so make sure you tune in that episode so you don't miss it. Thanks so much for being part of today's episode. Keep moving forward. The whole point of this podcast, while we started in the first place 12 years ago, was to give you enough so that you can implement, learn something, implement it today so that you have a better business tomorrow. Come back for the next episode, learn something, implement, rinse and repeat. You get the point. This is only valuable if you implement what you learn. So go ahead and just go through the five steps that I discussed with you today and make it happen. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons
31:08 Speaker 00 to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
31:40 Speaker 02 At California Closets, we design for the little things. Take this moment of a parent walking across their toy-filled living room for a glass of water.
31:53 Speaker 02 And now, the California Closets version of that moment.
32:03 Speaker 02 Family room and home storage solutions by designers who get you. California Closets, more room for what matters.
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