Motivation: The Driving Force

When it strikes your mind that you want to be an entrepreneur, the first question that you must ask yourself is why. Why is it that you want to start a commercial venture of your own? What’s in it for you? In other words, what motivates you to take an almost blind plunge into an ocean unknown? Is the prospect of making money or more money? Or is it about doing something new simply because you are bored of the old and the corny? Or is it about touching lives, if not changing them completely? The answer would give a clear indication of what motivates you. And if you motivation is right, there is little that can stop you from succeeding. As they say, clarity of purpose is more important than anything else for anybody who is capable of any goals in life.
In the words of David Karp, the founder and the CEO of Tumblr, an entrepreneur is simply someone who has “a vision to for something and a want to create.” But it is in the nature of startups to be confused about three basic things — the product, the customers and the ways to make money. It take some time for all entrepreneurs to gain clarity in all three areas, and the journey from not knowing anything about those three things to knowing all about them is also the journey from being a startup to being a successful business venture. About entrepreneurial courage, Reid Hoffman, the co-founder of LinkedIn, says it is like “you jump off a cliff and you assemble an airplane on the way down”. And while there might be some truth in what Hoffman says, it is not difficult to see that a blind leap of faith might not bring happy consequences for everyone.
Therefore, what startup needs from its originator is his or her compete conviction in the value of the startup. The term ‘value’ has many meaning, but the one that is most crucial for a startup guy is the one that involves ‘feeling valued’. In other words, the value of your enterprise is directly proportional to how valuable does it make you feel. Every member of the team that works for you on the project of your dreams must share the same passion for the project. And it’s always better if different people on your team are motivated by different things. Therefore, the one motivated by money would never let you lose sight of the business side of the project whereas the one who wants to change the world would keep you in touch with the core human value of the project, and the nerdy fellow who doesn’t care about the big picture but is always very careful about the minutest detail would never let a thing go wrong with the project. Once you have a team of such people together, there is little that can prevent your startup from rising in the world like a rocket bound for the most distant thing in the universe.
After all, what makes and shapes people is motivation, and it doesn’t take a genius to figure out then as to what force stands behind the people who shape and reshape the world.