by Derek Lidow
Explicit motivations are those of which you are conscious and can describe easily. They are created in the front part of your brain, where reasoning takes place. Examples of explicit motivations could be that “I want to lose weight,” or, “I want to start a company.” We naturally understand and can explain our explicit motivations. People with an explicit motivation to lose weight can explain how they plan to satisfy it—by hitting the gym more often or cutting down on soda, and so on.
Most of us are pretty bad at fulfilling our explicit motivations if we can’t do it quickly. Relatively few people maintain their resolve to go to the gym or lay off their favorite sodas. Maintaining consistency in the actions we plan over long periods of time is hard. Other explicit motivations compete for our attention and take hold on a day-to-day basis. For example, we might put our plans for losing weight on hold in order to have a long and relaxing meal out with an old friend or to drink a pick-me-up soda before a big meeting. It is almost impossible to be constantly thinking about our need to go to the gym or to stop thinking about how much we need a sugary pick-me-up. Too many other things are more pressing. Indeed, our explicit motivations are poor predictors of the long-term actions we take.
The actions we take to achieve our profound desires or avoid our most primal fears spring from our implicit motivations, not our explicit motivations. Implicit motivations are stored in the more ancient and inaccessible parts of our brains, near the back. Our brain is wired so that the primal parts have direct control over all our actions. For evolutionary reasons, those primal parts are hard to access—overriding what the brain had been programmed through evolution to do quickly and effectively for survival would have been dangerous and risky for early humans. Furthermore, our ability to negotiate on our own behalf could be compromised if our rival could figure out our most important desires and fears. They could use such knowledge to manipulate us—so we’ve evolved such that we ourselves do not even understand much of what drives us to do what we do.
Fortunately, our brain protects us from feeling too badly about failing to achieve all our explicit motivations. We construct and believe in ex post facto explanations that make us feel good about why we acted as we did. “I’ve been way too busy to go to the gym and too stressed not to have that glass of wine with dinner. I’ll try again when this big project is over.”
Entrepreneurs, too, are good at rationalizing when they fail to take any of the many incredibly stressful actions required to get a company up and running, to grow it, and ultimately make it self-sustaining: “I really didn’t need to make the calls to potential new customers to see if they liked the samples I sent them. I know they’ll love my improvements and it’s more important that I follow up on some action items today than to get this feedback.”
What might be happening is that the entrepreneur feels scared to call strangers. The explicit desire/motivation to have the product succeed with real customers is weaker than the implicit motivation/fear of humiliation or rejection by strangers (a fear many of us have for evolutionary reasons). Clearly, Jordan would have fared far worse if he hadn’t summoned the courage to project a highly extroverted Jody Maroni persona to the world. Jordan was willing to suffer potential embarrassment and rejection by passers-by to increase his chances of showing his dad that he could run his own business. Many entrepreneurs risk the future of their enterprises because they do not have the implicit motivations to deal with their very common fears.
Creating a business and making it valuable and self-sustaining is a long and stressful project and requires motivations strong enough to get past plenty of fear, fatigue, and unpleasantness. Explicit motivations won’t get anyone there. Explicit motivations just create short-term projects that are eventually abandoned or superseded. Successful entrepreneurs, whether bedrock or high-risk, are driven by strong implicit motivations. Lack of understanding of those core motivations can cause real problems. An entrepreneur is in a much better position to succeed if they are honest with themselves about why they need to be successful as an entrepreneur, because then they have a chance to do something about their motivational mismatches before they cause too much damage.
A classic solution is to find a partner who has a very similar vision for a successful business and who has complementary skills and personality traits. This works occasionally, but most often ends problematically when the partners’ visions for the business diverge. Entrepreneurs with access to lots of money can hire people to do what they do not want to do, but this is expensive and usually results in poor profitability that stresses the entrepreneur. Sometimes entrepreneurs find formal or informal coaches or paid therapists that help them find even stronger core motivations that they have buried or overlooked. Self-awareness and mindfulness exercises can enable such discoveries. (I describe some exercises for finding deeply buried motivations at the end of the chapter.)
Academics have spent a great deal of time studying the explicit reasons aspiring and successful entrepreneurs cite for having taken on the burden of starting an enterprise. But they have shied away from investigating the private and emotional reasons—a deeper level of understanding that’s hard to get to for researchers and entrepreneurs. There is also a sense among academics that “clinical” analysis is an imperfect science to be avoided, foreclosing an understanding of the dynamics of entrepreneurship. Not wanting to get “personal” with the entrepreneurs we study is analogous to a doctor giving a physical exam to a fully clothed patient. The patient may feel more comfortable, but the doctor is unlikely to find the rash that is a symptom of a disease that could be treated before it becomes fatal.
It’s Not Money
Entrepreneurs often cite making money as their motivation. Making money can be either an explicit motivation that disappears when something more important comes along, or it can be a proxy for a poorly understood implicit motivation. For example, your making money might impress your parents, make you feel superior to a rival, or alleviate the fear that your loved ones could ever go hungry. Making money can also serve as a socially acceptable proxy for some less socially acceptable implicit motivation, like craving power over others.
Josephine Esther Mentzer’s life was transformed by an insult. She was probably seventeen at the time. Estella, as she was then called, was great at engaging customers in conversation at the beauty parlor where she worked. She had learned some practical sales skills at an even earlier age, when she worked for an aunt who owned a neighborhood store that sold clothing and other sundry items. Estella loved to sell and bragged to her family and friends that “[They] bought more when I waited on them.” Even as a young girl, she was proud of what she had accomplished as one of seven children of an immigrant family in Queens. She was therefore stunned when a woman to whom she was tending reproached her for complimenting her on her pretty blouse and asking where she had bought it. “What difference could that possibly make?” the woman asked. “You could never afford it.”
Estella always cited that moment as pivotal in her life. She decided to dedicate herself to proving to the world that she could become wealthier, more glamorous, and more socially superior than any other woman in Queens. It wasn’t money per se that motivated her; it was transcending a lifestyle she felt was demeaning.
Working in a beauty parlor came naturally to Estella. From an early age, she had loved being made up, and she loved to make up others—to the annoyance of her father. As with most children living in homes of limited means, Estella was expected to work from an early age, first helping out on weekends in her family’s small hardware store. When she was a teenager, she was able to negotiate working at her aunt’s establishment instead, where she was called upon to do everything from keeping stock, to arranging the store windows and selling.
After the humiliating customer experience, Estella dreamt about another life, a life away from Queens. She realized that she wanted, needed even, the life of beauty and high society that she had glimpsed through the eyes of the customers she served in both
the beauty parlor and at her aunt’s store. Estella’s friends and family had long sensed her ambition and repeatedly teased her that she would probably open her own beauty parlor, or maybe even a dress store. But at that pivotal moment, Estella wasn’t so sure—she was thinking, “actress.”
Shortly before the beauty parlor put-down, an uncle from Austria immigrated to Queens and set up a chemical company that produced embalming fluid, delousing powder, eczema ointment, as well as lip rouge, fragrances, and skin care products. Because of her love of makeup, her Uncle John invited Estella to help him out after school. While embalming fluid was of no interest whatsoever, she was enthralled with learning how to make beauty products. Watching Uncle John attentively, Estella learned how to formulate her own beauty treatments, which she then applied to her high school friends in the evenings, watching for their reactions.
As Estella was finishing high school, she was swept off her feet by a handsome and witty twenty-five-year-old with a similar first-generation immigrant background. Joseph Lauter (the “t” changed only later to a “d”) had just started a business importing silk. Joe fit into Estella’s vision of a more beautiful and luxurious life. After they married and she had a baby, Estella put her plans to change her life into action by selling the face and hand lotions her uncle produced. But selling her beauty products to friends and neighbors did not satisfy her—she wanted to change her life in a bigger way.
Unfortunately, Joe’s business failed and he was frustrated by his inability to find a job and a place where he fit. Estella reproached Joe for his setbacks and worked even longer hours selling her uncle’s products, further driving her apart from her husband. These and other frustrations built to the point that Estella and Joe separated and finally divorced. Estella took her four-year-old son and moved to Miami Beach, where she felt she could be more successful on her own. She set up shop selling her beauty products in the lobbies and beauty parlors of luxury hotels—to a higher-class clientele than she had access to in the beauty parlors of Queens. As a glamorous, independent young lady, Estella attracted the attention of several of the well-to-do single and divorced gentlemen that vacationed or spent winters in Miami.
Living in Miami gave Estella a further glimpse into the life she wanted, but it still did not provide her with the means. Selling beauty products one at a time wasn’t going to make her rich enough to be respected by upper-class women. So she took yet another tack. She would borrow money from relatives and sell her own products on a much larger scale, making and packaging them exactly the way she wanted. She would move back to New York and remarry Joe, who badly wanted to reunite, provided he would agree to the terms she set: He would have to quit his job as a salesman and be her partner in running a beauty business. She would be its chief salesperson and spokesperson, while he would manage and run the back end. And to be a glamorous leader of a beauty business, she would adopt a new persona, taking on the more aristocratic sounding name of Estée Lauder for herself and her new company.
Estée worked tirelessly to make her company a success. She spent over two hundred days a year traveling to sell her products, to train her salespeople, and to promote her brand. Joe processed batches of cream, put them into beautiful-looking jars, and shipped out the orders from morning till late at night. He also looked after the kids, including a second son that arrived a year after they reunited. Their older son Leonard helped his father after school.
Estée was relentless, especially when trying to get her products into a specific department store. Several days a week for months she sat in the reception area of Saks Fifth Avenue, waiting to present and re-present her case for the prestigious department store to carry her line. Since the cosmetics buyer didn’t see the need for adding another line of beauty products, Estée thought up ways to get women to ask for her products at the store. The scheme that finally landed her at Saks was hatched when she offered to provide the party favors for a charity luncheon that was held at the nearby Waldorf Astoria hotel. In each of the three hundred bags of party favors she put a tube of her best and most expensive lipstick, a lipstick she specially packaged in beautiful metal tubes, something that was hard to find at that time. She told the ladies at the luncheon that they could get their refills at Saks. Within weeks, Saks agreed to carry the Estée Lauder line.
Estée grew her company one department store chain at a time and spent weeks on the floor training salesladies. Insisting that her products be presented in a certain way, she pioneered many of the cosmetics sales techniques still considered the best practices today, like free gifts with purchase and cosmeticians at the sales counters offering a free make-up session to try out her products. These techniques were effective for her when she sold her uncle’s products in beauty parlors, and she wanted every Estée Lauder saleslady to follow them exactly. It worked, and the company grew year by year.
But Estée wanted her company to be bigger and grow faster than the slow and steady progress she was making. Fortunately, the business was profitable, and both Estée and Joe were frugal in those early years, doing everything themselves and hiring workers only when absolutely necessary. She used the money in the bank to develop what she felt would make the company much bigger. At the time, perfume was considered a luxury, something only well-to-do women wore daily. With her many years of dealing directly with customers from around the country, Estée believed that scented bath oil could be an affordable and popular product. Youth-Dew was a sensation. The company doubled in size in a year, transforming Estée Lauder into one of the leading beauty product companies in the world and delivering to Estée the lifestyle and prestige she so desperately desired. Wealth was merely the means to that end.
Why Ideas Aren’t Enough
Neither Jordan nor Estée were motivated to become entrepreneurs by an idea. They each had a core motivation they needed to satisfy, and they each used personal skills to create companies that satisfied that need. They invented new ideas—new sausage tastes, new scents—but these ideas were, like money, just means to an end.
William Shockley did pursue his idea, a truly great one at that, but he loved his idea so much that he was unwilling to change it to make it commercially viable. He also loved his idea more than he valued his relationships with the smart people he had hired to work for him. But his love for his idea was ultimately not strong enough to make him want to change. Shockley’s motivation was to always be recognized as the smartest scientist wherever he was. He fantasized that commercializing his world-changing transistor would further increase his scientific prestige. But when commercial realities conflicted with his scientific priorities, the commercial realities were set aside. Shockley’s love of the transistor did make him a great scientist, but it could not make him even a mediocre entrepreneur.
Contrary to popular opinion, ideas—even great ones—cannot generate in a person the passion required to lead a successful and self-sustaining company. An idea can cause strong feelings in people, feelings strong enough to create the explicit motivations that could drive them to found a company. While the actual founding of a corporation is quick and pretty straightforward if you put your mind to it, growing it into something that produces value and self-sustainability is not. Just as passion as an explicit motivation for marriage fades with time, so does passion for an idea. Passion for an idea fades with the inevitable loss of control that comes when you realize that customers actually want something different, and it fades with the hardships that must be endured to make even some semblance of the idea a commercial reality.
Building an enterprise takes a long time and requires founders to overcome many challenges and hardships. “Identifying an opportunity” and “doing something fun, or interesting, or instructive” are not strong enough motivators. If you become an entrepreneur because it’s fun, then you’ll stop as soon as the fun fades. Similarly, if you found a company merely to learn how to be an entrepreneur, then you’ll feel OK about making mistakes, resulting in a demoralized and unstable team and some pretty unh
appy customers.
It is Always a Test
The world does not care if any of us become entrepreneurs, no matter what we may have previously accomplished. Becoming an entrepreneur is ultimately a personal, selfish decision. While we may describe our motivations for starting our own enterprise differently, we are all ultimately subjecting ourselves to a test: “Am I worthy of the status I seek?” We may make or lose money on our startup, but far more important than the money is how the experience changes what we think of ourselves and whether we proved what we set out to prove. And we must always prove something to satisfy our core implicit motivations. Core motivations always come with a test—they are two sides to the same coin. Passing the test is how you know you’ve achieved your core motivation.
While you do not get to explicitly choose your core motivations, you can choose whether you want to take the entrepreneurial test. Most people never test themselves; they either are not self-aware enough, and/or may be too scared to fail. All of our entrepreneurial role models endured self-imposed tests, but it’s likely that none of them understood the deep roots of their tests: being a better business person than their father, being more socially elite than anyone else in Queens, or being the best scientist of their age.
Whether or not you realize why you’re doing what you’re doing, you will stand accountable for making sure you’ve giving yourself the correct test, and that you test yourself correctly. William Shockley did not set the right test for himself. Somebody who aspires to be acknowledged as the best scientist on the planet should not be trying to produce products to sell. Jordan, once his Jody Maroni’s Sausage Kingdom was larger and more successful than his dad’s butcher shop, set himself a new test: being loved by the greatest number of people possible. The test of entrepreneurial success can be well aligned with this core motivation, as entrepreneurship is focused on making large numbers of people happy and getting money in return. But Jordan did not test himself correctly in two ways. First, he didn’t care enough about getting the money in return, and launched into ventures without enough analysis on potential issues that could prevent his investment yielding a decent return. Second, as we’ll come to understand later in the book, Jordan let others have too much leeway in delivering the Jody Maroni “joy” (i.e., happiness) to his customers, which diluted the experience and ultimately disappointed customers.
