10
Your What Needs a Why

It all comes down to motivation. If you really want to do something, you will work hard for it.

SIR EDMUND HILLARY

It happens to me several times a week. I want to quit. Just the other day, I wanted to quit my run halfway into it. After the first mile my lazy self asked, “Why can’t we just walk?” For a while, the voice got louder with each step. But if it’s not running, it is something else: my marriage, my business, my friendships, even God. This is just the nature of life. The temptation to quit is a recurring theme. And if the voices in our heads were not enough trouble, the voices in our culture also urge us to “throw in the towel,” “make a change,” or “take it easy on yourself.” What these same voices fail to tell you is that there is a distinction between the dream and the work required to obtain it.

“Everybody looks good at the starting line,” sings Americana artist Paul Thorn. Starting is simple. It’s progress that’s tough. The hill is steeper than you thought. The road is longer than you assumed. You are not sure you have what it takes to finish. I have been in this spot many times. I faced it in running every half marathon. I’ve seen it in my career and as an entrepreneur. I’ve even experienced it in my marriage and in parenting. Especially parenting.

When we begin a project there’s all kinds of enthusiasm. We’re energized by that surge of excitement that comes from novelty and our own creativity. But that surge is like starter fluid; it’s not the fuel that will see us through the journey. That’s why so many New Year’s resolutions only make it a few weeks. To go the distance with our goals, we need something stronger.

The Myth of Fun, Fast, and Easy

Everything important requires work, and sometimes there is a long arc between the dream and its realization. Some of us are more prepared to accept this than others. In her book The Gifts of Imperfection, Brené Brown blames our reluctance on the culture of fun, fast, and easy.1 We are conditioned to want results now—tomorrow at the very latest. We want it without expending a lot of effort. And of course, we must have fun doing it; otherwise, we are on to the next thing. But other than a few lucky exceptions, most payoffs are not immediate.

Unmet by the instant success we expect, we can lose heart and give up. I’ve seen this a hundred times in a dozen contexts:

• The spouse who is worn down after several years of marriage and is ready to walk away
• The parent who is struggling with an out-of-touch teenager and feels like giving up
• The entrepreneur who has invested months, maybe years, into a new initiative but loses heart for lack of traction
• The author who is excited about a new idea but grinds to a halt four months into writing the book
• The employee who fails to hit revenue goals and starts checking out
• The leader who is struggling to turn around a business unit and finally throws up her hands

I have personal examples galore, and I’m sure you do as well. The truth is that anything worth doing isn’t all fun, it’s almost never fast, and it certainly isn’t easy. Take fitness. I knew I needed more core strength; it’s one of the keys for balance and endurance, especially in the second half of life. But I wasn’t making any progress. I started half a dozen times but couldn’t gain any momentum, so I finally hired a fitness trainer. It’s been tough. My trainer constantly pushes me out of my Comfort Zone. And progress seems slow at my age.

Early on I was frequently tempted to quit. I stuck it out, though, and I did so by leveraging five elements. The first is perspective. Look at the careers of great leaders, innovators, or athletes. Was it an instant shot to the top with no setbacks for any of them? Not usually. Obstacles, reversals, and even failures are all part of their success path. That’s true for everyone. We can’t bank on being the exception—that’s just an illusion guaranteed to derail and disappoint us even more than the problems we’re facing.

Second, a new frame. As we discussed earlier, our expectations shape our experience. When we reframe our frustrations, we can usually find a foothold for forward momentum. Instead of letting the worst picture prevail, I ask myself empowering questions to help me push past the difficulty I face. What, for instance, could this obstacle make possible? How can I grow in this situation? What should I be learning in this challenge?

Third, self-compassion. Perfectionism and self-judgment are sure to derail us. “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” G. K. Chesterton once said. That line always makes me laugh. But it carries an essential truth: Doing is better than not doing perfectly. Give yourself a break and keep plugging away.

Fourth, a sense of agency. Don’t lose sight of this. Entitlement, as Brown says, is about feeling like we deserve success. Agency is the exact opposite. It’s realizing we must work to achieve it. Agency sees an obstacle and says, “I can overcome this,” while entitlement complains about not being done yet. If we keep our agency, we can survive the times our dreams cease being fun, fast, or easy.

Fifth, your why. This one is so important I want to spend the rest of the chapter on it. In my experience, the thing that keeps me going is answering this question: “Why am I doing this in the first place?” I then try to remember the dream. I try to get connected to the original vision, because that keeps me going when the going gets tough. No one crosses the messy middle to reach their goals unless they really want what’s on the other side of discomfort. Think about parenting or getting fit or hitting a major professional goal. All of these challenges will test our perseverance. This means we have to connect with what researchers sometimes call our “autonomous motives”—reasons we find deeply, personally compelling. Why does it matter to you?

Identify Your Key Motivations

When goal pursuit is tough, it’s easy to lose focus or discard the goal. If we don’t stay connected to our why, as one study put it, “the infusion of goals with energy may be distressingly temporary.”2 In other words, chances are good we’ll burn out and bail. But as another study found, “Autonomous goal motives will result in greater objectively assessed persistence toward an increasingly difficult goal. . . . If individuals strive with more autonomous motives, they will be better equipped to overcome challenges in goal pursuit.”3 Your why makes all the difference in the world.

Blake is the 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever alum whose girlfriend dumped him two days before a giant tree landed on his house. He coped the way a lot of us do: he ate and drank his way through the stress. Coupled with letting his exercise routine go, he put on forty-five pounds. He knew that had to change. As he followed the course, he assigned key motivations to each of his ten goals. “Once I started working my way through them, I was able to identify the importance that it had for me,” he said. “Not for some exterior force or a result, but why it was important for me to achieve this. That’s when I really started connecting to them and started believing that not only were they words on a piece of paper but this was something that, yes, I have a part in.”

Blake is talking about the power of intrinsic motivations. These drivers come from our hopes, our values, our ambitions. External motivation comes from outside influences like society, our friends, our bosses, and so on. External motivations are rarely as long-lasting or effective as intrinsic motivation. “When goal pursuit is fueled by personal endorsement and valuing of the goal, commitment and persistence will be high,” wrote the scholars of the second study quoted above. “In contrast, when goal pursuit is the outcome of pressures or external contingencies, commitment will always be ‘on the line’ and goal attainment will be comparatively less likely.”4 If you want to go the distance, you’ve got to find a reason that speaks powerfully and personally to you.

When I was running my first half marathon, I had to get in touch with my why. It wasn’t about what somebody else wanted me to do in terms of my own health. It wasn’t a fundraiser somebody wanted me to run to raise money for their organization. Instead, I identified a series of motivations individually important to me. For example, I wrote this down:

1. I’m tired of being overweight.
2. I want to get into the best shape of my life.
3. I want the stamina and the energy to be able to be the most productive self I can be.

I had to identify my why. I had to see what was at stake if I achieved it. And I had to see what was at stake if I didn’t achieve it.

I consider Steve Jobs a powerful example of this. When he came back to Apple in the late nineties, the company was almost bankrupt. If Jobs hadn’t stepped in to save the company, there would be no Apple today. No iPhone. No iPad. No iMac. No MacBook Pro. No AppleTV. These are tools I use every day of my life. But Jobs’s why went deeper. Not only did he cofound the company, he also had a radical vision for the inherent value of simple, elegant machines. That vision drove a product-line overhaul and new marketing strategy that not only saved the company, it drove it to dominance. Jobs and his team got in touch with their why and changed the world.

So what are the whys attached to your goals?

Record and Prioritize Your Key Motivations

I write key motivations as a series of bullets and usually end up with somewhere between five and seven. I recommend listing each one until you run out. After that you’ll want to prioritize them. But not all. I recommend identifying your top three. You may have plenty more, but I find it’s most effective to boil your list of motivations down to just a few that really inspire you. Go through the list and rank them. Why is this important? You want to identify your most compelling motivations so you have several convincing reasons readily available to keep pressing and accomplish your goal.

For example, when Gail and I have a fight—yes, we do have fights—I ask, “So why should I stay in this marriage?” Instead of pushing that question down like holding a beach ball under water, I let it surface and embrace it. “What is at stake?” Notice: I’m not asking “Why should I quit?” because I will get answers to that question too. The mind is tricky that way. It will attempt to answer whatever question you ask it, so be careful with how you frame the question. Instead, I focus on the positive. I am looking for reasons to keep going.

Here’s the list I keep for my marriage. When the going gets tough and the question arises “Why should I stay in this marriage?” I have a ready resource to reorient myself:

1. Because I want love to be the defining characteristic of my life. There is no better place to learn how to love than marriage. I really do love this woman with all my heart.
2. Because I want to be a leader, leading myself first and then my own family. Whatever else this means, it means initiative and sacrifice. That’s what leaders do.
3. Because Gail is my best friend, even though we occasionally get on one another’s last nerve. She is the one person I can count on to be there when I need someone to listen to me.

I have a written list like this for every important area or goal in my life. If I get stuck and want to quit, I pull out the list and start reading through it. Immediately, it gives me perspective and energizes me. It makes it possible to silence the voices and get my head back into the race.

A few years ago I was writing my book Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World. I had a very clearly written goal: “Deliver a fifty-thousand-word manuscript to the publisher by November 1, 2011.” I had a great plan. As I started the year, I began writing. By the middle of the summer I had a rough, very rough draft of the manuscript that was about fifty thousand words. But I had a lot of work yet to do. Then things got crazy busy toward fall. I was inundated with speaking requests, coaching inquiries, and consulting assignments. I had just launched my business, and I was reluctant to say no to anything. Well, naturally, I got buried alive. And I wasn’t making any progress on the manuscript.

I could see I was going to miss the November deadline by a mile. Honestly, I got discouraged. I didn’t see any way to get it done. And despite all the work I’d already invested, I wanted to give up. Then I remembered something my wife had said to me many times before: “People lose their way when they lose their why.” That’s when I remembered I had written out a bulleted list of my key motivations. I knew they would be important when the going got tough.

Here are the top three motivations I listed then:

1. I want to help tens of thousands of authors, artists, and would-be creatives who have been turned away because they don’t have a platform. [This was one of my fundamental motivations for writing the book in the first place.]
2. I want to establish my authority as an expert on platform building and open the door to additional speaking engagements on this topic.
3. I want to prove that you can create a platform and use it to sell books.

When I reconnected with my key motivations—not just intellectually but emotionally—it reignited my passion. I recommitted to finishing the manuscript. I was a few weeks late, but I did it. And Platform went on to become a New York Times bestseller. All because I reconnected with my motivations. I found my why. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine what would have happened if I hadn’t kept my list of key motivations for Platform. One thing I know for sure. My current business wouldn’t exist.

Connect with Your Key Motivations

Now, when I say connect, I mean this in two ways. First of all, intellectually. It’s important to have intellectual buy-in to the motivation. Maybe it’s some research you’ve done, remarkable data, or an argument you find intellectually compelling.

Second, you need to buy in emotionally. It’s not only important to understand it. It’s important to feel what’s at stake. Anticipate what it would feel like to achieve that goal. Or, conversely, what it would feel like if you missed that goal.

One of my key motivations for strength training is to increase my energy, stamina, and productivity. I connect intellectually because I know all the research points to those outcomes. But I connect emotionally because I remember what it feels like when I’m strength training on a regular basis. Even before I exercise, I can feel that increased stamina, energy, and productivity.

When researchers at New Mexico State University tried to figure out why people like to exercise, they came back to the power of this emotional connection. Nine out of ten in one group said they exercised because they expected to feel good afterward. Seven out of ten in another group said they did it because of the sense of accomplishment they feel.5 Writing your motivations down is important, but getting that kind of emotional connection is even more critical.

Another example comes from how I structure my week. I talk about this in my Free to Focus productivity course. I think of my week like a stage. I divide the time between Front Stage, Back Stage, and Off Stage time. Front Stage time is when I’m working on the projects that are in my Desire Zone. These are the projects that drive the most revenue for my business and intersect with my greatest passion and proficiency. Back Stage time is dedicated to the more mundane tasks of managing the business and preparing for those Front Stage performances. But Off Stage time is reserved for rest and rejuvenation.

I used to work almost constantly. But then I began to see the wisdom in totally unplugging on the weekends—going Off Stage. My key motivation is to recharge my batteries and be fully present with family and friends. I got that intellectually. The research on this point is irrefutable. That was enough to get me started. It was enough for me to commit to Off Stage time. But it took a while to connect with it emotionally. I love my work, so completely disconnecting did not come naturally. Now I love the downtime and look forward to it. I’m not only intellectually committed; I’m emotionally invested as well. And that’s enabled me to stay the course.

Everyone struggles staying the course. Ray, the 5 Days to Your Best Year Ever alum I introduced earlier, sure did. Year after year, he made health and financial goals. Meanwhile, his health deteriorated along with his finances. Though he ran a successful business, he was spending more than he was bringing in and racked up $400,000 in consumer debt. When he told me that, I almost fell out of my chair. But that was only the start. A few years ago Ray was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, a degenerative disease that affects his central nervous system. It can be terribly debilitating.

We can know the reason why a change is good, but we won’t change unless the motivation lives in both our heads and our hearts.

Ray said, “I’m almost fifty years old and I’ve been telling myself one day I’m going to get out of debt. One day I’m going to take care of my family. One day I’m going to build a retirement fund. One day I’m going to get in shape. One day I’m going to travel and do all the things that I promised my wife from the day we got married. And I was suddenly faced with the reality that might not come.”

But as terrible as those circumstances are, Ray found his why buried inside. “I finally had that wake-up call where I realized I either had to do this now or was never going to do it. And I also knew my family was watching. I wanted to be there for them. I want to be there for my son’s wedding. I want to be there when he has my grandchildren.” Those reasons, along with the desire to leave his family debt-free with a thriving business, lit a fire under him that kept him going even when he ran out of steam. “When I felt the temptation to stop or to give up, or rationalize why I shouldn’t do this after all, those reasons keep me going.”

When the year was over, Ray had lost more than fifty pounds. His doctor was surprised by his health. Ray also achieved a first-time-ever goal of hitting a million dollars in top-line revenue for his business. And he paid off all $400,000 in consumer debt.

Another 5 Days alum, Sundi Jo, has a powerful story as well. In 2009 she entered a residential program to turn her life around. With the help of therapy and prayer, she was able to work through several traumatic experiences that had crippled her. “It was one of the hardest, most rewarding things I’ve ever done,” she recalled. Then in 2012, Sundi Jo felt God tell her to start a residential program for other girls in need. At first she said no. “I said no about 175,000 different times,” she jokes. “It was too big for me. It was too scary, and I didn’t want to do it.” But she felt God nudging. When tragedy struck a friend, she realized it was time. Every year Sundi Jo goes through the course, she adds to the vision of Esther’s House of Redemption. She started with a goal to get the articles of incorporation started, then the day program, then finally the full residential program. “There are some obstacles coming up,” she says, “but I remember my why.” I can’t tell you how excited I was when she told me she had met her goal and opened the doors of the residential program.

Bottom line: You’ve got to write down your motivations. And you have to connect with them, not just with your head, but with your heart.

What’s at Stake for You?

To get through the messy middle, when progress seems impossible, find your why. Look at your goals and ask yourself, “Why is this goal important to me personally? What’s at stake both positively and negatively?” Once you’ve answered those questions, I recommend you list and rank your top three so you can quickly find your most compelling motivation when the going gets tough. The sample goal templates at the back have a place specifically designed to capture your key motivations. To give you an additional edge, in the next chapter I’ll share several ways you can master your motivation—even when it feels like you don’t have much left.