Motivation - Why it's important for businesses.

It's easy to start a business, but it's not as easy to keep at it, and keep working to add revenue to it. For every businesses, there would be a time where the owner would have a certain breaking point - it's up to them to let the business break or make the business a huge success. Being so ambitious, I have learnt from previous experience that one important factor for a business' success is motivation.

What is motivation?

In simple terms (my terms), motivation is the drive to do something. Whenever you think about that 'something', you just want to do it get it over with and by getting it over with, you're doing it the best you can. 

Why motivation?

Why not? Without motivation, we'll give up easily. Like a student studying for their exams - if there was no exams, would we bother to study? I think most of us would rather eat popcorns and watch movies - at least, that's until we lose our motivation in that. 

Take for example, my experience in  Young Enterprise. For those who doesn't know, Young Enterprise is a business that students run at school as an 'enrichment lesson'. I was initially the IT Director - little did I realise I was going to change into a Sales' Director instead. All because of some Christmas Cards.

You see, because we were new in the business world, we didn't know what to sell and since Christmas was approaching, we decided to carry out a competition for students to design Christmas cards (Christmas cards? For college students?). After we chose the best design, we produced 150 of it - and guess what? That was when most of the team members said "It's not going to sell". Needless to say, I was annoyed. I mean seriously? They could've said that BEFORE we produced the thing?

Since they didn't think it was going to sell, they didn't make that much effort into it. So, I end up going around the school during my free time to sell. My friend thought it was pretty unfair since I work my guts out while most of the others sit down and complain. I say most because some others still did sell about 20-50. I sold all of the 100 left. Happy? Completely! It was undeniably difficult - keeping a smile on my face even when I felt mistreated and trying to sell seemed hopeless. But, thank God - I managed to keep that smile and sell. When the team realised we were out of stock, they were pretty much surprised, and they gave me a round of applause (yes, just that). After that, we moved to other projects, to sell other stuff. And that was when I was changed to being the Sales' Director.

So get yourself motivated

The whole point of my story was - if you're not motivated - motivate yourself. Because, if I never did, those cards won't have been sold and we never would have made a profit, and we would never have moved to other projects since we would always say "there's no point, it's never going to sell". Agree with me? I know you do. Here are some books which you may find useful in boosting your own or others' motivation.