Motivating Yourself – Heroes, Role Models & Rivals

Being a netsetting entrepreneur is very much about motivating oneself. Unlike traditional employment there is no boss-figure watching over you, making sure you’ve done your job and giving you new tasks to do. That’s an extremely liberating feeling, but it also presents its own challenges. How do you stay on track? How do you keep yourself moving when you’re feeling lazy? And when things are going well, how do you push yourself to grow, to take risks and to be better?

Motivation is a rather complex subject so in this post I’m going to talk about just one motivation tool that I use, namely other people. Heroes, role models and rivals are three types of people that keep me focused.

Heroes

I think everyone should have a hero in life. Someone you aspire to be like, who you look up to and whose actions you pattern yourself on. Having a hero is a good motivator because not only does it push you to keep a high standard to your own actions but when you feel dispirited you can ask yourself how your hero would respond.

For me, my hero is my own father. He is a man with complete assurance as to what is important and what is not, and he always keeps these values foremost and lets them dictate the events and character of his life. I admire this and try to model myself in the same way. So for example, I feel that honesty and truthfulness is very important. That means that in business I try to make sure that they are key values for both myself and for our company Envato. Sometimes it’s a very difficult standard to live up to but I try to keep in mind how my dad does things and what he would think of actions we might take and it helps keep me on track.

Having a hero will keep you on the right course when you’re unsure of what to do, motivate you to perform at your peak and will be a source of strength when you need it.

Role Models

While I only have one hero, I find role models everywhere. They are people who exhibit some characteristic I admire and try to emulate. Thus I think it’s possible to have many different role models, each excelling in a different field.

When I was training for a long distance running event some years ago, I would keep in mind a famous Australian footballer named Shane Webcke who was known for his stamina and endurance. This guy looked like a tree trunk with a head made from sandbags, and no matter how many times he’d get tackled, no matter how many charges he’d led and no matter how exhausted everyone else on the field was, Webcke would still be going. So every time I felt myself flagging I’d think about this footballer and find a burst of energy and renewed commitment.

A business role model I have is the company 37Signals. I very much admire their general philosophy, particularly some of the ideas in their book ‘Getting Real’. Whenever I encounter difficulties and barriers I remember the page on Embracing Constraints that goes:

Let limitations guide you to creative solutions

There’s never enough to go around. Not enough time. Not enough money. Not enough people.

That’s a good thing.

Instead of freaking out about these constraints, embrace them. Let them guide you. Constraints drive innovation and force focus. Instead of trying to remove them, use them to your advantage.

37Signals

This is a wonderfully inspirational passage that is brilliant advice for startups, and there are many other gems just like it in that book. So while I may not always use or sometimes even like the 37Signals products, I do aspire to many of their values.

Rivals

Enough of this namby-pamby feel good stuff, what about good ol’ capitalist competition? Rivalry can be a very powerful driver to keep moving, innovating and pushing forward. It is a useful motivator because you can find great rivals in any industry or field of work. When you identify rivals you track their progress and their successes and push yourself to outdo them.

I usually pick out rivals for pretty much every website or project I work on. I will choose the best competitor around, the one I admire the most and then keep them at the back of my mind as the standard to beat.

Rivalry keeps you on your toes, pushes you to go further or harder than you might otherwise. It stops you from getting lazy or overly contented and ensures that even if everyone else is patting you on the back saying what a good job you’ve done, there is someone out there driving you on.

When I find a consistently awesome rival site or company I will keep track of their traffic, their activities, their prices, their size, their community and what ever other information I can get, and I use this as a motivator to improve our own sites as much as possible.

I believe it’s critical to keep rivalry friendly. Choosing rivals isn’t about deciding some unsuspecting person out there is going to be your whipping post, rather it means finding the strongest competitor in the room and deciding that they are the benchmark you will measure yourself against. A friendly rivalry even allows space to link to and support your rivals, understanding that this isn’t about them, it’s about you doing your absolute best.

The great thing about benchmarking yourself in this way is that there will always be someone to aspire to. This fluidity will keep pushing you to new levels of achievement as you outgrow old rivals and find even greater ones.

Staying Motivated

Whomever you might choose as a hero, role model or rival, the important thing is that they help you to stay motivated to excel and succeed.