Motivation

I learned a very profound thing from my partner Dave Jilk at Feld Technologies 25 years ago. I have been practicing, and getting better at it, ever since. It’s a core part of the way I work with people and I have Dave to thank for it. First, some context. Feld Technologies was my first company. Dave and I started it in 1987. We hired, then fired, a bunch of part time people and then just worked together – the two of us – for the next 18 months until we hired our first employee (Shawn Broderick ). We were cash flow positive every month because we never raised any outside money. We both did everything, working very closely together. As the company grew, we partitioned a lot of things – I became the sales guy – generating much of our new business. Dave became the software guy, managing the team and getting the work done. But we continued to work closely together – he sold plenty of business and I did plenty of work, including doing all the network integration work for our clients, and occasionally managed something. ...

I’m sitting on my balcony on the ninth floor of a hotel overlooking Miami Beach thinking about motivation. Specifically, mine. I’m deep into writing the first draft of Startup Communities and – with Amy – decided to plant myself in a warm place for two weeks as I finished up this draft. We got here late Monday night. Today is the first day I wrote any words on the book. I procrastinated as long as I could and finally opened up the doc in Scrivener and started writing after my run today. I pounded out a solid hour of writing before shifting gears, responding to some email, and writing a few blog posts. I know that I can only productively write for a max of four hours a day before my writing turns into total crap so I’ll be happy with another hour today. I’ll then consider myself fully in gear for four hours tomorrow. ...

At a talk I gave recently to a room full of first year graduate business school students, I was asked “what motivates me.” Before I answered, I felt compelled to explain what intrinsic motivation is and used the following example to describe it. “Tonight, I’ll spend about 90 minutes talking to y’all. I’m doing it because I enjoy it and I learn from it. While I hope it is useful to you, that’s not the reason I’m doing it. While I hope you have fun, learn something, and enjoy our time together, I won’t feel better or worse if you do. In fact, since my goal is to learn from everything I do, I’d much rather you give me feedback about things you think could have improved our 90 minutes together.” ...

One of my blog readers – Boaz Fletcher – sent me an awesome video this morning from RSA Animate. It’s 11 minutes long and is a fascinating lecture by Dan Pink about The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us. I love the RSA Animate format – an artist animates the talk on a giant whiteboard in real time. In this case Pink takes on the question of “Does More Money Motivate Higher Performance?” In the first few minutes he shows that while this works for tasks requiring mechanical skill, this does not work for tasks that require even rudimentary cognitive skill. In fact, in these cases there is an negative correlation between greater monetary reward and increased performance. It’s counterintuitive, but the talk illustrates it beautifully with several examples that will appeal to any technology entrepreneur. ...