Startup world, Y U SUCK AT MOTIVATE?

Mar 09 2012 Tags: , , , , , ,

The startup world is awash with truly inspirational stories and speeches, arguably the best of which is Steve Jobs’ Stanford Commencement Speech.

Muhammad Ali

The world of sports, also, is awash with inspirational stories and speeches.

But athletes have something the startup world lacks – motivation. That thing a trainer tells you before a big match to pump you up, to make you want to win, that burst of immediate motivation you need to overcome your own limits and win.

Watch any movie about sports, at one point the hero will want to pussy out, defeated by their own body. Somebody will give them a passionate motivational speech and the hero triumphs. Emotion. Power. Glory.

Startuppers … well, when somebody flounders, we give them advice. Weak, wimpy, advice. Fuck emotion right? Fuck passion, passion isn’t something you have passion is something you talk about having.

Screw you.

Inspiration is good! Inspiration is great! But before doing that important sales pitch, before walking into that VC’s office, before tackling that bug in your code, before quitting your job to do your own thing … that’s when you need motivation.

I could hypothesize for hours about why athletes [and some other physical disciplines] are so great at motivation and startuppers suck … maybe immediate goals are easier to define, perhaps being pumped and ready to kill doesn’t benefit us.

But you know what? None of that matters.

Before your next coding session, before that important 5 minute pitch, listen to these! Last night they helped me destroy 300 SQL queries for a request and shave off 5 seconds of load time.

HOW GREAT I AM [unembeddable]

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6 responses so far

  • http://twitter.com/zidarsk8 Miha Zidar

    Each person finds his motivation somewhere. But sometimes that motivation gets lots, and you wonder around like a headless chicken slowly dying and still trying to acomplish something, but without motivation that’s what we are. Headles chickens. It’s awesome that you can write a blog about how great motivation is, and how drive is important, but finding the wright motivation is hard. It’s like searching for that one lego you need to finish your toy, it takes forever to find it and when the toy is finished, the lego pops up everywhere. Same goes for all the things, when you need something (like motivation) it’s 10 times as hard to find it, as per when you don’t need it.

    Instead of writing something that all of us know deep down (we lack motivation), I think it would be much nicer if you wrote on how we can find motivation. Not the kind you get from watching a 4 minute youtube video, not the one where you say to yourself “after I finish this, I will have a muffin.” How does one find real motivaion.

    I have been strugling with freaking for loops in python for the past 3 days, trying to write something I know I need to finish soon, but I have yet to write a line of code that does not make me sad and go “ggdG” in vim.

    Real motivaion is a Bitch to find.

  • http://swizec.com Swizec

    What you need isn’t motivation, mate. You need some good old stepping away from the problem, having a few drinks and doing something completely unrelated for a couple of hours.

    And those videos up there aren’t really for people who lack motivation, they’re for people who have the motivation, but need to go “GRRRR!” and show their war face.

  • http://smotko.si/ Smotko

    I really hate sports movies because they are always the same. Like Swizec said in his blog: the main guy will want to give in and then somebody will motivate him, and the main guy will win, get the girl and the movie will have a happy ending.

    But real life doesn’t work like that at all! To win you will have to train really hard, and no matter how motivating the guy next to you is, it will still be up to you to do everything. And then when you do everything that you possibly can, somebody will get ahead of you by cheating, or exploiting the rules or by just being better and all of your hard work will be in vain. But this wouldn’t make a good movie…

    This may sound bitter, but try to imagine a life where everyone could succeed like in the movies. Success would loose all meaning as anybody could do it, and you wouldn’t feel any joy in doing anything. So it is actually a good thing that we fail from time to time, as it just makes success taste that much sweeter. 

  • http://swizec.com Swizec

    You’re missing the whole point of those movies. They are telling exactly the same thing you are here, with the caveat that it makes for a better movie if the hero is lucky enough to have everything work out.

    Those movies/speeches are _exactly_ about the fact it’s all up to you. That there is nothing anyone else can do for or against your success. And that’s what the actual motivation comes from.

    You mention cheating … fine, so cheat. Nobody is stopping you. If winning means more to you than playing fair, nobody’s stopping you from cheating, even less so from exploiting the rules. And yes, sometimes no matter how much you give, how hard you work, you’re just not good enough. But I bet you’re still better off than deciding in advance that you aren’t good enough and sitting on the couch all day.

  • http://smotko.si/ Smotko

    Swizec I think we disagree only on the part about sports movies. I just feel that sports movies generally suck. Those films try to tell you that you will win everything if somebody gives you a good enough motivational speech before the deciding match. They are also usually so full of cliches that you can’t really take them seriously.

  • http://swizec.com Swizec

    Maybe, but I still think you’re taking those movies at face value too much.

    How can you say that a movie where 95% of it is training hard, fighting with inner demons, losing matches etc. and 5% is a motivational speech and triumphing in the end is trying to say “All you need to win is to listen to a good speech”?

    As for cliches, just look at what Kranjec said after winning the skijumps world cup. He spent the last few days before the competition, just relaxing, working on his mental state. All the training and hard work will be in vain, if your psyche kills your performance when it matters.

    Ask any athlete – performance in any competition is usually worse than in practice, for no obvious reason.

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