Reverse engineer your daily decisions

December 11, 2014 2:39 PM

Once you identify the small collection of intrinsic triggers that stoke your creative fire, nothing can stop you. Once you learn how to activate your own internal generators, there’s no reason you can’t become prolific. It’s simply a matter of fleshing out the drivers that motivate you on an hourly basis.

One exercise for doing so is to sit down and physically map out every single decision you made on a given day. Phone calls you made, conversations you had, food you consumed, activities you did, people you saw, ask yourself, literally, why did you do what you did? You likely discover that most of your behaviors can be traced back to a handful of primary motivations.

Several years ago I was mentoring an entrepreneur who couldn’t stay motivated. With nobody outside of himself to be accountable to, trying to focus felt like an exercise in futility.

I told him he wasn’t alone. Every entrepreneur gets distracted. It’s almost impossible not to. With nobody to hold our feet to the fire, it’s not always easy to get warm. And what’s really tempting is to rationalize our way out of feeling guilty for poor work ethic, since there’s nobody around to keep us in check.

But together, we built out a system of collegial accountability. He was an extrovert by nature, so we figured out that the secret to his motivation was regular meshing with the energies of other entrepreneurs.

And so, by combining regular attendance at coworking spaces, peer networks, trade associations, artist collectives, mastermind groups and online programs, he slowly began to mitigate his motivation and accountability issues. And in time, his productivity got back on track. Even when he was working alone.

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Are you a master of activating your own internal generators?

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For a copy of the list called, “12 Secrets of Supremely Successful Writers,” send an email to me, and you win the list for free!

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Scott Ginsberg

That Guy with the Nametag

Author. Speaker. Strategist. Filmmaker. Publisher. Songwriter.

[email protected]