AF284 - Show Me The Money

People start businesses for many different reasons oftentimes with money as the root of it all. I’m diving deep this week to uncover the layers of why money is never enough to keep you moving when times get tough. You need more than money and I’ll help you get there.

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We all have these things that we would not do. There are jobs out there. Professions that people do for money that some of us would never do for money. There are certain things that money simply will not motivate us to do. And that is the topic today. Why money is not enough to keep you motivated. A lot of people start this, start businesses because they just need more money.

It is a tough economy that we are in right now. The reality is, after Covid, we are still dealing with all the effects, such as a down economy, inflation (prices going up), and all kinds of different things. Money is definitely at the forefront of everyone’s mind. We have less of it, we are spending more on uncommon things, groceries, and gas. Everything’s costing more and things are becoming a little bit scarce because of wars overseas and all kinds of different things. We are all affected in some way. 

There are things we are not doing in our business, even though we are being paid. We are making money in our business because if you are not making money in your business, you do not have a business. You have a hobby that is expensive. That is the truth.

Why is not money enough to motivate us? As an entrepreneur, no one is forcing you to get up and do your job today. 

Why not these things on our list get done? Why do we procrastinate? Why do we put things off? Why is not a paycheck enough to keep us consistently taking action?

If I solely relied on money to motivate me, I am going to be couch surfing far more than I am going to be. Goal smashing. That is just real because sometimes we want something more than money. 

The root of all of this procrastination, which we all do, is perceived protection. When we procrastinate, there are a couple of things that are happening. For some, the fear of success is actually what causes them to procrastinate. Procrastination gives you the illusion that you are being protected from some sort of higher expectation or greater responsibility that comes with succeeding.

Are you afraid of greater responsibilities? Are you afraid of managing more? Have you not hired someone in your business even though you know you need help because you are worried about training them or being responsible for paying them, that is fear of success. 

If you hire someone. you are not only an entrepreneur but also someone else’s boss. With great power comes great responsibility, right? So the fear of success is clouded or shrouded in some of these other emotions and other things and manifests itself in these different ways.

What about fear of failure? This is probably more common and more easily seen. Those who procrastinate fear failure. They try to keep themselves safe from facing their greatest potential and reaching their greatest potential by avoiding challenges and putting things off that they fear will not turn out in their favor. That is the fear of failure. You are worried that it is going to go wrong, so you do not even try, you do not even start. You just stay where you are. 

we are all motivated in different ways. We all did. we're all different people. I love our differences. I really do. I am fascinated by people who are completely different than me because I'm just leaning in. I want to know what makes you tick. What do you think? How do you approach problems? How do you solve them? How are you influenced by the people around you and the culture and the religion and everything that you grew up in? I love learning about that. But I also know with all different personality types, we all respond differently to different motivators. Some people respond better to reward and praise and affirmation, and some people respond better to the impending doom of negative reinforcement. We all have different ways of being motivated, avoiding bad, and pursuing good.

If someone were to come to you with the top three tasks in your business that you are avoiding, what would motivate you to get them done? What is your personality style? Do you do better with positive rewards for accomplishing tasks? Or is a threat to your happy existence more of a motivator? Here are some examples of that. The three overdue things in your business that need to get done by the end of the week. You have already put them off for two weeks. So that we are setting the stage here. What appeals to you more? Just think about these things for a second. 

Or if I do not get these things done, it will cost me an entire day of yard work, or I will have to send a hundred dollars to my worst enemy, or I can't participate in my favorite hobby until these things get done. How are you motivated? Which one of these things appeals more to you? We're all motivated in different ways, whether by the penalty or by reward. Think about your past. Think about the things that you look forward to if you were not able to do them because of these tasks that are on your list. 

I am literally working to the bone to do that because then I can do whatever I want. I feel free. I feel at peace. I feel accomplished when I get things done. But there are things I do not love doing that I am still responsible for. Let us just be honest. We all have tasks in our lives that we are responsible for doing that we do not like doing, and they all have some sort of result, or consequence, whenever you want to call it. So there is always a result, a consequence, something that happens negatively or positively of the choices we make. 

Another piece of that puzzle for motivation is accountability. You want something, but you just struggle to take action. And some people are motivated by accountability. The guilt or shame of not doing it is something that actually motivates you. 

Another key factor in motivation is real. It is the purpose and the reason you started your business in the first place. I want to make more money. I started my business because I want to do something more exciting. 

Maybe it was really to have more control over your income potential. Sometimes you might be in a job that you love, but the income potential is, it is what it is. There is just not a whole lot of room to grow or move up or be promoted. It is just kind of like a job I love. But this is kind of the salary and I get my 1% raise every year and that inflation is riding rising at 7%. So I am already in the hole and I like what I do, but I am not making enough money to do the things I want to do. Maybe it was to have a more flexible schedule. Maybe your circumstances or life has changed in some way to need you. You know, maybe you are caring for an ailing parent or a sick child or recently had a divorce and you are a single parent or whatever your situation is. You want to work from home. You want to gain control over your income status. You want to leave a nine-to-five job that you actually hate. Some people hate their job, some people love it. Maybe you want to follow a dream that is all your own. Perhaps you wanted to start this because you want to be more creative and use your talents and skills in a way that makes you feel excited. 

Whatever made you land in this place, is your key motivator. It changes over time. What motivated me in 2014 to open Mommy Income is not the same as what motivates me to get here every single day and produce podcasts and talk to you guys and lean into you and you succeed. There are different motivators at different times. It may change over time, but there will always be a reason that you wanted this as opposed to the alternative. Maybe you have not taken the time recently to explore the alternative. Maybe you are so far removed. Maybe you have been doing this for 10 years and you forgot why you wanted to do it. 

Recently I have had burnout. I need these motivational speeches sometimes for myself because I struggle. The same with the motivation that you do. What if this Amazon business is too hard or you are stumbling all over everything and you are really frustrated? What's the alternative? Is that better? Is that going to get you to your goals? Do you even have goals? I am going to give it a try. Does anybody even write anything down anymore? Yes, I do. I got sticky notes everywhere. I got papers everywhere. I am a tactile hands-on. I have to write things. There is something connected with the hand and brain when you write stuff down. It has been proven. 

Why do you need more money? What do you think more money will do for you? What is the benefit of having more money?

What do you think you will feel if you have more money? What will change in your life if you had more money and it is more money for a time or money consistently? These are really serious questions to consider. Most people, just so you know, are not considering this. They just put their head down, work and work, get the money, work, and work, get the money, and then come to the end of their life and realized, that they worked a lot for a lot of money, but never had time to spend it because they were too busy working to even enjoy it. Did I even enjoy the process? Did I hope that someday I will retire and then enjoy my money? 

I desire your highest good and your highest success, and you have more potential than you are giving yourself credit for. So what do you think money will do for you? How do you think you will feel when you have more? How much more? Let us be honest, lack of money makes us feel insecure. It makes us feel restricted. It makes us feel frustrated and annoyed, and maybe feelings of failure come in. Maybe failures of missing out on things. There is a feeling involved with lack. 

So if there is a feeling involved with lack, then there is a feeling involved with abundance. What do you want to feel at the end of the day? Business, job, relationships, everything. Is it security? Is it relief from stress, pressure, freedom, and control? See, money carries this illusion that all things will be, will be better when there is more of it. 

Pretend that all of a sudden your salary doubles. We are going to be doing our taxes soon. What is your net income for 2022? I am saying net income because we are talking about the money that is coming in and actually going into your bank account and not what Uncle Sam takes and not what you are putting in your 401k.

Just let that sink in. Think about it. We are not talking about money sitting on the beach and retiring and not doing any more work because I would venture to say that even if some of us' salaries doubled, it is still a salary. Meaning you have to work for that salary, but all of a sudden the work that you are doing has doubled. The money has doubled for the work that you are doing. 

It is hard to play, pretend, and it is hard to imagine. But if you do, what does life look like? What would actually change in your life if your income doubled? What would change in your business? What do you think this would do for you? We just went through this exercise. I am in the Goldman and Sachs 10,000 small businesses program. And we recently did this exercise where they told us to envision our business in three to five years and write our goals. What would you like to see your business look like in these many years? And then as we were doing this, they walked around and they gave us $50,000 checks and they said, “Okay, here is your $50,000 check.” You have six months to spend every dime. Name the top five things you are spending money on. 

What would change in your business? What would you do more of? What would you do less of? Would you hire someone? And then as we are writing this stuff down, about three minutes later they come and they hand us a bigger check and they say, “You still have to spend all of this money $500,000 within six months.” What are the top five things you are spending money on? You have to spend it all gone. That is what the exercise was. And then they came back and said, “I have a $5 million check.” These are fake checks, of course. But I kept them because I was like, “Oh, I've never had a $5 million check before, so I think I'm gonna keep this fake one and just pretend it's real.” But the reality is, what did you say at that point? This is all full disclosure and honesty. I was like, if you handed me a check for 5 million, I would retire. I am not going to grow my business with it. I am going to retire. And they are like, “Why did your goals change the moment that we handed you money? Is money your only motivator for running your business? What about your clients?” And I thought you are right. I would not just retire. 

I did not think about retiring when they gave me a $50,000 check. So that is kind of proof to show you that it is not just the money that motivates me. I actually care about my clients. I care about people succeeding. That is the reason I started Mommy Income to begin with. It was not motivated by money, it was motivated by help and support. Because when I was starting my business, I did not have that. I did not have it in abundance. I had it a little bit here and there. I am not saying I was not supported. I am not saying there were not great men out there. And when I say men, I really mean men. There were not a lot of women teaching. Now, this is not a man versus women thing, so don't, you know, take this to the bank with that. But we have a need to of understanding, of desire for understanding. 

We want people to be like us and understand our perspective. And so whether we are from a different culture, a different gender, a different race, a different reality, a different income level, we all want to be understood and feel relatable. And I found it really difficult in the beginning to relate to some older men that were the main breadwinners of their families that did not have young children under feet to take care of and run a business at the same time. It did not seem relatable to me that these gentlemen that were teaching in the Amazon during those past years. This is many years ago, at least 10 or 12 years ago. I did not see any women really teaching how to start and run businesses on Amazon or e-commerce, with young children under feet. This is Mommy Income. This is the reason Mommy Income was started because there is no one else there like me talking about the same struggles that I had with it that they did not have. It does not mean it is right or wrong, it is just different. It is just a different relatable way.

We do have boundaries. Would all of a sudden having more money motivate you to do all those tasks? Probably not. Most likely not. Does having more money motivate you to do those tasks you have been putting off? It does not. No, you could now afford to outsource those tasks that you hate or don't know how to do to someone else. Even if you say, “I'm gonna hire out all the things I hate”, you still have to develop a plan, and a process and train that person to do the things you want them to do. 

Before we jump into the idea that more money equals more freedom, I beg to differ. More money, more problems, more power, more responsibility. Procrastination comes from fear. We do not do things because they are hard. We do not do new things because we are hard. We do not know how to do new things and we fear it will take too much time to learn or too much time to train or too much time. So we do not do them. We do not do things we do not enjoy because who the heck wants to spend their time on things they do not enjoy but they are necessary. What we do not find enough value in them to make time to do them. That is one of the real realities. If you really want to peel back the layers, if you really want to say, well you do not do that because you do not want to do it and you do not want to do it because you do not care about it and you do not care about it because you do not think the result will either positive or negative is going to be valuable to you. 

QUOTE:

“If these three things get done, I will give myself a reward. Maybe a special dinner, a day off, a spa day, new shoes, extra round of golf, whatever that is, whatever is your favorite thing or one of your favorite things.” - Kristin Ostrander

RESOURCES:

• Why You Should Sell Wholesale Bundles on Amazon
• Wholesale Bundle System 3.0
• Dream Big Step Small
• Mommy Income Hub Group
• HUB
• WSB Student Facebook Group

Keep on bundling…

-KO