Find some entrepreneur motivation to get started or keep going when it gets tough.
Create your own motivation to boost your self-discipline and productivity when working for yourself.
1. Find your why
Why did you want to become an entrepreneur?
What can you achieve with your own business that you can’t working for others?
Here are 7 common entrepreneur motivations:
- Passion
- Adventure
- Independence and freedom
- Create your own job
- Purpose
- Well-being
- Money
Freedom is a common factor. You want to be free to be creative or in charge of the strategy. Maybe you want your schedule to be flexible in a way that having an employer can’t allow.
Remember why working for someone else is soul crushing. That’s not the case for everyone of course. Many people can find it fulfilling to join a team and take part in the common goal.
But a true entrepreneur at heart will find it difficult to stay in a corporate setting and not fulfil their purpose.
Owning your business allows you to live your passion and build the perfect job for yourself.
Find your reasons why being an entrepreneur is who you are and who you want to be.
2. Set SMART goals
You want to set SMART goals (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-Bound) instead of sticking to vague ones.
Situation 1
If you want to “sell more products”, it’s not specific, you can’t tell if you’ve succeeded or not. It’s hard to plan your actions to reach that goal as you can hardly divide it in small steps.
Instead, you should be way more specific. Let’s say that last month you sold 20 products, and you want to double it by the end of this month.
Your SMART goal would be “to sell 40 products by the end of the month”. Your objective of “selling more products” hasn’t change but now you’ll clearly know if you have achieved it.
This method can be applied to anything.
Situation 2
Here’s another example for someone with a side hustle. Maybe you’re working from 9 to 5 on a job and then you’re supposed to work on your side hustle during your spare time.
However, you feel like you aren’t working enough on your side hustle, you’ve been distracted and inconsistent.
So you set a goal to “work more on my side hustle”. But that’s way too vague to have any impact on your habits.
Look at your schedule, the amount of spare time you currently have and figure out a manageable amount of time you could allocate to your work.
Your SMART goal should be to “work 10 hours on my side hustle this week”. Now you have a target: 10 hours, and a deadline: Sunday.
With that specific goal in mind you can plan ahead to make sure you achieve your short-term and long-term goals.
3. Schedule your days
A big part of entrepreneur motivation and keeping going is to plan.
Entrepreneurs know what they have to do on any given day.
You need to be on top of your to-do list if you want to achieve your big goals.
Use your SMART goals to organise your schedule and plan ahead.
Work on different time frames. Have your monthly, weekly and daily goals and schedules.
The key is not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.
Stephen covey
Set time blocks to focus specifically on a matter and get into the flow without distractions disrupting your work.
Going back to my previous example, let’s say you want to work 10 hours on your side hustle in a week. Divide this weekly target to spread it across different days, taking into account your specific needs.
- Maybe your motivation is feeling strong on a Monday and you can get 2 hours of work done.
- You know you won’t be very motivated on Tuesday so you plan to work 30 minutes.
- On Wednesday, you have more time so you want to work for an hour and a half.
- Towards the end of the week your energy tends to dip so you take that into consideration and plan to work 30 minutes on Thursday and take a day off your side hustle on Friday.
- With that schedule, you’ll work for 5 hours on your weekdays and can spread the remaining 5 hours on Saturday and Sunday.
Time-blocking isn’t magically going to get things done on its own. With each time block, you should have a clear vision on the tasks you want to complete to reach your goals.
Similarly to dividing your time, make sure to set SMART goals for your work and have definite to-do lists for each day.
4. Reward yourself
Being an entrepreneur is tough so you have to make sure to celebrate your wins.
No need to go all out for everything. But plan your rewards when you’re setting new goals.
Whenever you complete a goal, get your reward that matches the work accomplished.
This is a good way to keep going when you hit an obstacle.
The reward should be important enough that it drives you when you’d rather stop and give up.
Orchestrate your entrepreneur motivation and reach your goals.
Finding your entrepreneur motivation every day is no easy task. Keep working on these 4 tips to persevere and get where you want to be.
