by Ryan Blair
9
WHAT’S DRIVING YOU?
The Death Cycle: Day in and day out, you get up before dawn to make a grueling commute to a dingy building, where you spend eight, nine, or ten hours a day working at a job that doesn’t fulfill you, doesn’t exhibit your talents, and makes you dread each moment you have to spend thinking about it. By the time you get home to your family, you are too drained to enjoy their company and too tired from thinking of the day of drudgery ahead to make the most of your free time.
How do you break out of it? The first step is to figure out what motivates you.
Motivation can steer both our short-term and long-term decision making. It can affect our personality, temperament, and interests. It is one of the most powerful forces in our lives—and it is often subconscious. We rarely stop to question exactly what our motivation is in each circumstance, but by taking stock of the motives behind our decisions, each subsequent move will be more deliberate, directed, and effective.
The very first step in creating your business is rooted in motivation—what drives you to want to become an entrepreneur? “I lost my job and I need something to do” isn’t going to cut it. A mind-set that allows something external to be in control also allows your circumstances to define you. And we are not defined wholly by our circumstances, because if that were the case, I would still be in jail.
In my experience, there are four main drivers that urge an individual toward becoming an entrepreneur: independence, wealth, recognition and fame, and contribution. You will likely find that you have a mixture of all of them, but it is important that you pinpoint the main driver by figuring out how far you would be willing to go to obtain each one. When you discover which of the four you would pursue with more intensity and determination than you would the others, you’ve found your primary driver.
Independence is a common driving factor for many entrepreneurs. They are motivated by the day when they can fire their boss and walk out of the office with confidence. If setting your own terms of employment and working by your own standards toward your goals sounds appealing, then independence is probably your main driver—and that’s one of the most exciting things about entrepreneurship.
Being one’s own boss is a strong motivator for many people. A thriving, free-market capitalist system in which anyone can try to succeed by doing what he or she loves is one of the aspects of the American tradition that makes this country great; independence is an integral part of that tradition.
Wealth is also a great motivator. Unless you were lucky enough to be born as a trust-fund baby, chances are good that you have to work for a living. There is more to being driven by wealth than simply wanting a fat paycheck, however; if that’s all you’re after, then obviously there are far more secure means of achieving that goal.
There is no need to be ashamed if wealth is your driver. It has been the driver of nearly every great advancement that’s ever been made throughout history.
Some people act as if profit is a dirty word, as if the pursuit of making money as a small-business owner somehow makes you greedy, or that concern with the bottom line means you’re obsessed with money. Nothing could be further from the truth. By generating wealth, you are providing for your own needs, for your family’s needs, and—moving beyond your own immediate considerations—probably creating jobs in your community as well.
Recognition and fame are also legitimate reasons why some people enter the entrepreneurial life. If you have a solid product or service, you should take pride in that, and having your name associated with what you do demonstrates to your customers (and your employees) that you have confidence in your company.
Fame can be a great motivator for someone who is tired of being counted as only a number in a company. The desire to have your skills noticed can be a strong motivation, especially if you have felt underappreciated in your previous job. Recognition might be as simple as proving to the world that you are savvy and tough enough to succeed as a business owner.
Everyone wants his or her fifteen minutes, and fame can make you money. It can make life easier, but can also swing like a double-edged sword. There’s an old saying about recognition: “Babies cry for it, grown men die for it.”
Contribution is also an important driver. People who desire a sense of contribution feel compelled to give back to their community or to meet a basic need for people, animals, or the environment—any cause that promises to enrich lives or leave the world a better place.
Often, entrepreneurially minded individuals who find themselves driven to contribute are drawn to the service industry or nonprofits. If this is you, you may find yourself in a bit of a quandary: Is it possible to operate a for-profit business like a nonprofit one or vice versa? Absolutely. Someone’s profits fund nonprofits.
True nonprofits depend largely upon grants, donations, and public funding to operate. You can create a business model that meets the same needs as a traditional nonprofit, but you can operate in such a way that it is not dependent on external funding. A business that works with local governments to help place people in jobs or develop work skills can be self-supporting through the city’s or county’s payment for services. For instance, it is entirely possible to run a profitable business dedicated to helping other local businesses go green.
Do not let the drive to be a social contributor scare you away from the prospect of starting your own business. The two certainly can coexist. Just recognize that your ultimate goals are probably going to be different from those of many of the other business owners in your area. That’s simply because you have different drivers, and the drive to contribute can be the foundation of a financially successful business whose profits can be further invested in the community, doing even more good work. For example, at ViSalus, our Feed the Kids initiative is a for-profit business model that serves nonprofits.
Did any of these four drivers strike a chord with you? Keep in mind that your primary driver might change with time and circumstance. Personally, I’ve felt each one become my primary motivation at different points in my life. The key is recognizing where you are right now as you get ready to start building your business plan and making sure that you are honest in your assessment of yourself. Otherwise, your business and your life will arrive in the wrong place because the goal you pursued the most aggressively wasn’t the one you really wanted.
If you are driven by fame, you may find that the desire to amass personal wealth has to become secondary as you take on gratis projects to get your name out there. If you are driven by independence, you may have to wait until you have a slightly higher bank balance before you begin investing in charitable or socially conscious causes, simply because you are pursuing security first. But later, when your business is firmly established and you’re ready to move to a new challenge, you might find your primary driver moving, too.
By determining the driver that best fits your current situation and mind-set, you will be articulating authority over your circumstances. You are giving a label to the personal force that is bringing about this change in your life.
As we all know, there are a number of things that go into becoming successful and maintaining success. Additionally, the mark of having “arrived” can be different for each person. The point at which you feel you have made it is a very personal thing. But by staying mindful of the criteria by which you set your goals, you’ll have a better sense of how to evaluate your progress as you move your business forward.
My advice is to be aware of your primary motivation. For me, as I got ready to launch my first venture, the driver was pretty simple: I was a fame-and-recognition guy. A guy that I had worked with at Logix had become a multimillionaire entrepreneur; he was driving a Ferrari; all my friends were talking about him; and he was all over the news. I’m competitive. And I wanted to compete.
The next question you need to consider in creating your business plan is this: Where is your passion? What do you absolutely love doing? After identifying your motivation, this needs
to be the next starting point for developing your company, because if your heart isn’t in it, you’ll have a much more difficult time finding the energy required to get your idea off the ground and running.
Take stock of your skills, interests, and hobbies. Do you find a common thread? Determine what you are naturally drawn to, and evaluate your strengths, whether or not you have formal training in the area. Do not be afraid to push around some of the boundaries and preconceived ideas that might be limiting how you view yourself and your talents.
For example, a friend was starting to question the future of her career. She was a successful actress and model who had appeared in several movies. She had a definite career established, but she didn’t love it.
We discussed the importance of finding her driver—identifying the appeal of that one thing that would motivate her to go to all ends. It wasn’t recognition. There are quick and easy ways to gain fame (especially in the world that is Hollywood) that she was not willing to pursue. It wasn’t wealth. There were other profitable lines of work, but she was focused more on obtaining personal fulfillment and expression than on chasing a big paycheck.
So I asked her a very basic question: What would you choose as a career if you were guaranteed a steady income for the rest of your life, provided that you pursued this one thing? She immediately answered that she would be an interior designer. She loved color, shape, texture, and lines—this was why she was drawn to modeling in the first place. She had a strong sense of the aesthetic and of what makes something visually appealing. She’d never been to design school, but she always found herself mentally arranging and rearranging interiors because of an innate artistic sense.
However, she’d always had a strict definition of what artist meant: palette and canvas or clay and wheel. She didn’t realize that her own interest in expression also made her an artist. To watch her start to redefine herself in those terms was exciting. She had an end in mind, which was to create beauty to make an impact on people through interior environment. Her vehicle could change from photography to acting to design, but what she was seeking was the same: she wanted to obtain fulfillment from design by asserting creative control over artistic drive.
The first home she designed was mine, and that led to several other clients. Now she’s well on her way to a new career where she does what she loves.
YOU’RE NOT A STEREOTYPE
That’s how the human mind works—we create definitions and an identity for ourselves, and we don’t always realize that we can shift and apply our experience to new industries and new ideas. People who come from an industry rarely change it. Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com never sold books; Steve Jobs never sold music. The Model T was invented by a two-time businessman failure, with a background in farming. And he was Henry Ford. A very antisocial guy created tools that enabled him to be more social, and shifted the way 600 million people communicate. Zuckerberg didn’t say, “I’m not social.” He said, “How do I shift humanity to my way of being social?”
For me, the area that really sparked my interest was technology, but my passion for that field was multifaceted. I was driven by intellectual curiosity for the subject matter; however, I was also intrigued by its earning potential and by the fulfillment and reward that it brought to me as an outlet for creativity.
My life and my entry into computer science were anything but stereotypical. My first experience with computers was fueled by my troubled relationship with my father. Early in middle school, when my dad’s addictions were the worst and I was still living at home, I earned some terrible grades in school.
Rather than face the beating I knew was coming, I watched the mailbox and pounced on the report card when it arrived. I knew that Dad wouldn’t miss it by a day or two, so I went over to my neighbor Jeremy’s house and asked to use his family’s new computer. I spent a couple of days carefully recalculating my GPA—if a D changed to a B+, how would that change the numbers?—and counting every space and hard return line so that my fake report card would be identical to the real one. Methodically and precisely, we re-created that report card on the dot matrix printer, with better (but believable) grades. I had steamed the envelope open, so when the new report card was ready, I dropped it back in, glued the envelope carefully shut, and put it back in the mailbox. My parents never caught on, and I avoided another pounding.
I realize that perhaps this is not the best story to introduce how I discovered my passion. But it’s honest—and I still have that report card. More than just putting one over on my dad, though, that incident stayed with me for a long time because it was empowering. I felt that a computer gave me the opportunity to assert control over a bad situation.
From that point on, I’d watch my sister’s dad, Steve (we all have different parents), repair computers, which he did for a living, and I was captivated by the engineering of them. I was fascinated by movies like War Games, which showed how kids could hack other computers. That association stuck with me: computers equal power.
Later, when I was actively a juvenile delinquent, I got into shoplifting. I didn’t steal normal things like candy or video games; I went into computer stores and “liberated” books on how to repair and program computers. I read up on everything I could about the technical side of computers because it was empowering.
One day when I was in Juvenile Hall (for the aforementioned shoplifting, among other things), I was sent into the computer room for a typing class. I realized quickly that I was one of the only people there who knew how to manipulate the computer system. From then on, every time I was in the computer room, I would mess with the system. Sometimes I would shut it down or delete a few files because the prompts were so simple back then. Sometimes I was even asked by an oblivious instructor to fix the “problem” that was making the computers crash. It was such a thrill for me to have control of their network while they controlled me.
I talked about computers all the time, to the point that the first gift Robert Hunt (soon to be my stepfather) gave me was a CD-ROM. It was his birthday gift to me because his computer was pretty old and slow, and with the way I constantly talked about programming, he figured I’d want something I could use to maximize the performance of that antiquated system. It was from this background that I started eyeing the data center at Logix, which was my first real opportunity in the field of computers, and that allowed me to start climbing the ranks.
The first time I boarded a plane in my adult life was for a trip from Los Angeles to Minneapolis to discuss a piece of software that Logix was developing for the Mystic Lake Casino Hotel. I was twenty years old and had limited real-world experience, but as I talked to the president and other executives at Mystic Lake about what we could do for them that our competitors weren’t doing, I had a realization: I wasn’t the guy getting the commission for the sale, but I was the guy they bought the software from and someone else got credit even though I had to build it.
It was suddenly so clear. Not only did I realize that an obvious passion for my business helped close the sale, but beyond that, I recognized that I was the engineer behind the product. I could write the code, or I could oversee the code writing; I could do the sales, or I could manage the account. And that was when I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. It was from that aha! moment that I started to formulate my business plan for 24/7 Tech, a twenty-four-hour-a-day technical support service—my first business.
Our drivers and passions can come from wildly different sources; the key is to understand what they are and why.
I had a bit of a rockier path. Even when I was striving to avoid detection, be it faking that report card or “fixing” the computers in juvenile detention, I was still seeking recognition. That was my driver. I wanted the satisfaction of knowing that I had mastered a skill, and (as I started to realize later, while working for my stepfather) I wanted someone to take notice of that and be proud of me. As that recognition started to pour in, my own confidence in the field grew to the point where I knew I would be able to
branch out on my own in the field that I found most amplified my driver.
Think about Anthony Hopkins’s road to success. Before he was an established superstar, he acted in every production he could. He was onstage as much as possible, and often for no pay, but he was driven by the love for what he did, and he was willing to sacrifice almost anything to pursue it. What would you go to any ends to pursue, as Anthony Hopkins did with acting? What grabs your interest and won’t let go, despite the long hours, low pay, and constant obstacles in your path? What wakes you up at night and keeps you from going back to sleep because you can’t stop thinking about it?
It comes back to the question with which we began: What do you desire most? Independence, wealth, recognition and fame, or a feeling of contribution? Which one would you sacrifice the most to obtain?
Write down your interests, your skills, and do some soul searching. Think about it. Talk to your friends and family and ask them what they think your main driver is out of the four. See what they reply. Sometimes it’s easier for others to see what your driver is, because as an entrepreneur, you’ve got to have a little bit of all of them.
Listen to your friends and family. But in the end, you have to trust your gut. Don’t go with what sounds like the right answer or what you think other people expect of you. Know your motivation, choose a business you would do without pay and build something that wakes you up in the middle of the night, something that you’re proud of and you can’t stop thinking about. Like Jay-Z said, “You’re not a businessman; you’re a business, man.”
10
TAP THOSE ASSETS
Every one of us has untapped, undiscovered, and unmonetized assets. I’ve laid out some examples in this chapter in hopes that they will give you a solid base to start your own inventory and spark ideas about assets you might not have previously considered.
