Reader Question: Talented but Lacking Motivation -- Leechon

Samar from Saudi Arabia writes:

A year ago I left my day job as a senior graphic designer at a firm after two and a half years working with them here. To be honest I was bored and I felt it was time to do something of my own.

Since I’ve ventured out on my own, I just can’t seem to be able to ground myself enough to start on something and carry it through until the finish! I have so many ideas whether its little projects or huge! I’ve tried so much but NOTHING materializes from it!

People tell me I am very talented creatively, but I am lacking motivation!

I don’t believe your challenge is finding motivation. It’s my assumption that you are unclear of what you want for yourself, which I believe is a challenge of lifestyle design.

I wrote an article previously titled: “Developing a Higher Purpose for your Business and Dawah Venture” << this article is appropriately a precursor to what I’ve written below.

In this post I present to you the importance of having “fire in your belly,” the three key elements you need clarity on to live the life you want, and I conclude with a (fictional) story of how Ayoub shares his passion for tea with the world.

Two questions you need to answer; (1) What do you want for yourself? (2) How do you want to live your life?

Without knowing what you want for yourself, you will be lacking a key ingredient: Fire in your belly. It’s the undeniable need to succeed which will drive you forward through the ebbs and flows of life.

Passion alone isn’t enough to complete what you start because it rises and falls through time and it’s influenced by several factors. However, the need to succeed, to fulfill a vision greater than yourself is constant.

We all have responsibilities of sorts.
On top of that we all have aspirations.

The key is to designing our life and pursing of our goals such that it fulfills our duties and aspirations at the same time.

The way to do this is to assume the inevitable. We’re all going to die sooner or later. Assume that it’s going to be soon, and by “soon”, I mean give yourself a death date – label it “D-Day” on the calendar to not freak anyone out.

How do you live your life and pursue your goals such that they’ll survive your own passing? Assuming you know what your goals are and you have an idea of what you want out of life, you need clarity on the following three things:

First, Secure a Vehicle

Just as we use planes, trains and automobiles to get to our destinations in life, to fulfill a vision – regardless of what that vision is – and get to where you want to go, you have to secure a vehicle to get you there.

There are three types of vehicles in my opinion.

Type 1: Your Own Business Venture (your vision)

Type 2: Employee at a Job (you buy into a vision of another and accept is as your own)

Type 3: Volunteerism (same as employee, but you don’t get monetary benefit for it)

Regardless of what vehicle you pick you have three roles to fulfill;
(1) Entrepreneur (or intrapreneur for type 2 and 3) – the visionary innovator
(2) Manager – the process maker and implementor of the vision
(3) Technical expert – the person who does the actual work in the front lines

Second, “Trailblaze” Yourself to Hit Your Goal

This goes back to leveraging the fire in your belly to hit the goal you’ve set out for yourself and be that much closer to the vision you have for yourself. Like in all journeys, you’ll face complications, roadblocks and detours. The key is to continue with lazer-like focus.

Third, Build Systems to Maintain & Surpass Your Goal Without Your Presence

This is legacy building.

Let’s take the following story as an example:

Meet Ayoub. He’s got a business venture website project where he’s selling tea that he’s truly passionate about it. Every cup of tea he drinks is like being transported to another part of the world and he wants to share that transcending experience of drinking exotic tea with others.

Ayoub has defined his success as getting 10,000+ unique visitors to his website which result in at least 1200 sales of various brands of loose-leaf tea packages every month, from which Ayoub can pay himself to live the lifestyle that he’s aspired to live so that he can take care of his family, travel and experience more tea.

First Ayoub needs to personally sell and build relationships with distributors and online vendors to reach the sales numbers he’s set out. However, once he reaches that number, if he were to personally stop, so would his sales. Thus he decides to develop processes to define how he can get others maintain the relationships and drive traffic to his site so people can continue to buy his tea and he personally doesn’t have to continuously work long hard hours.

He implements a digital system that enables other tea enthusiasts who regularly blog and make videos to receive commission whenever someone buys tea through them.

He also leverages the power of search engines to drive traffic. He calculates how many tea-bloggers he needs to drive traffic and starts working toward building that system.

Ayoub then realizes that he can duplicate himself by creating videos of himself traveling to the different tea gardens across the world educating people about the various benefits of tea. None of the other competitors in his space are doing that, so he spends the next six months producing videos that do just that.

After 6 month’s he observes on social networks that people are talking about him, his videos and how great his teas are.

Ayoub decides to leverage the conversation to grow his brand of tea further by engaging them directly online and interacting with them and driving them to a website landing page where he can communicate with them via email directly through an initial set of automated messages which are then later followed up by occasional direct emails.

Ayoub now has four streamlined systems that are doing what he started off doing manually:

System 1: Online sales people (tea-enthusiast bloggers) and search engine optimization
System 2: Video (YouTube) – basically sharing the tea experience with others as he’s always wanted
System 3: Social networks – he’s in a crowd of people talking about him
System 4: Email – automated system to sell tea directly to their inbox

At this point, Ayoub can give the management of the system to someone else, retire, disappear or die and people will still be able to share in his wonderful experience of tea – which was his dream initially.