As a business owner, you need to stay motivated as an entrepreneur.
The secret to staying motivated is to understand The Dip . This lesson alone will make you a better entrepreneur and improve your mindset.
Before I explain The Dip in detail, there is a video version of this post that you can watch here. It’s essential for your new business.
Let me ask you to think about when you first started your journey to become a successful entrepreneur. You may have felt a great deal of motivation.
As a small business owner you probably felt a lot of excitement about the idea of building your business. Maybe you had a personal goal to become the next success story, finally quit work so you could become your own boss.
It’s an achievable goal.
And when you think about your startup, about the hopes and aspirations you had, the idea of entrepreneurship probably seemed very different than the reality?
So when you started doing the work, what happened?
Even with goal setting, you might have found the the entrepreneurial journey more difficult than you first anticipated.
Maybe you didn’t get the results that you expected and that made you feel kind of uncertain, maybe even a bit confused and possibly even depressed. Building a successful business was harder than you expected?
Maybe now you feel depressed and lack inspiration.
And maybe you’re even thinking about giving up on your dream, because you’re not reaching your business goals?
Don’t worry. This is a natural cycle.
These difficult times are a part of the process that every successful business owner goes through.
I’m going to show you how to break out of this situation and how to push yourself through those negative feelings and start getting the results you want.
The Dip: The Secret To Entrepreneurial Motivation?
The concept was developed by Seth Godin, he found that when we start a new project, we feel excitement and our emotions are up.
Your feelings are represented in the graph down below. After the excitement, the curve declines into uncertainty because you’re not getting the results you want. The further you go into it, the more work you do, the more confused you become and the more depressed you become. At this point, you feel like quitting and go back to try something else so you can start feeling the excitement again.
What happens if you don’t quit? Okay, there’s a chance that you will never succeed but if you’re on the internet doing digital marketing content creation, the chances of you failing are pretty low.
When you start accepting that building a business is not an easy thing to do, you start exploring things, you start testing out new ideas within the parameters that you’ve already set yourself. You will start experimenting with different types of content, different formats, you’ll start testing different offers, seeing what really works.
Then when you start testing things, you start seeing what works, that gives you confidence and motivation. Continuing working, you get confidence and mastery and all of these new feelings will replace the negative ones.
The Dip In Action
This is one of my YouTube channels. I uploaded my first video in 2010 and then I didn’t do anything. As you can see, I had a burst of excitement and productivity and then I didn’t get the results I wanted so I stopped and I didn’t really do much with it for years, I just kind of left it alone.
Then we can see around here I start to get interested all these years later after doing nothing. In around 2016, I started again, I started feeling the passion for the project and I thought, “I’ll give it another go.”
Then look at the second wave of excitement. You can see there, it dipped down. What happened was I had this burst of good feeling, productivity, but I didn’t get the results I wanted so I stopped again. Then I thought: “Well, I’ll give it another go”, and then this time, I made a bit more of a serious commitment and I pushed through.
I started uploading about once a week for this period of time. I was kind of happy with that even if I wasn’t getting amazing results. You can see there, I was just getting like 30 or 50 views a day, so not amazing results but I kept going, once a week, one piece of content every week.
After a while I decided that I was going to start publishing more frequently so I increased it every day. What happened was even though I wasn’t getting the results I expected, I still carried on pushing through.
Because I was publishing content every day, consistently, look at what happened.
The views started to increase and increase and increase and increase. From going around here, so say like 30 views a day up to 400 views a day. The only thing I did different was make a commitment to stick with it, to push through.
If we look at this aspect of the dip; uncertainty, confused, depressed, matches this bit here. Then when I decided to not quit and push through and accept that it’s going to take time and hard work, that’s when I started getting results.
That’s the dip explained.
We all go through this process. The next time you start a new project or maybe you’re involved in a project right now, and you think “Well, is this going anywhere? Is this worth my time and my effort?” I would say give it at least six months and then at the end of those six months, look at how far you’ve come.
Look at the results you’re getting on month six versus the results you got on month one. If there is growth in the right direction, then it tells you that it works.
Have Realistic Expectations
Okay, it’s not going to work as fast as those get-rich-quick scams have told you. If you know me, if you know my other businesses, my other channels, you know I am so much against that get-rich-quick nonsense. I’m against pyramid schemes, I hate all that guru nonsense.
I’m trying not to swear, you know what I’m talking about but the problem is, a lot of those guru-type people, they take advantage of good, honest, hardworking people.
They come along and they say, “Look at the amazing results I’m getting,” and okay, those gurus might be getting outstanding results but what they don’t show you is all the work and the effort that goes into getting those results.
I am showing you the amount of effort, time and focus it takes to get results. That business makes a healthy full-time income from that number of views.
In fact, it made really decent income way back, even before I got to four or 500 views. But the point is that it takes a lot of dedication and hard work to get results. That’s what these get-rich-quick scams don’t tell you.
They’ll try and show you just the positive side of it and it creates this unrealistic perception of what’s achievable. Sure, they do get those results, but it’s taken them years or a lot of investment to get those kinds of results. I’m showing you the truth.
I’ll leave it up to you to decide if it’s worth it for you.
Longterm Success
When it comes to building a business on the internet, you’ve got two choices: You can invest a lot in advertising and hope it works, In most cases, it does work when you have everything optimized, but you’re going to have to invest quite a lot to get serious traction, or you can do content marketing, which is where I’m at.
That’s what I teach, because that creates long term results.
You’re not dependent on advertising, because with advertising, if you stop advertising, what happens? The traffic stops, your business stops, sales stops, the money ends, right? But with content marketing, you put in the work early on.
If we go back to the stats, in the end, you can see I’ve actually reduced the amount of effort I’m putting in up in these results compared to the previous one. I was putting in a piece of content every single day through this phase.
Then I stopped and I reduced it down to three pieces of content a week but yet I got better results. That’s how content marketing works.
You put in the work early on, you push through the dip, and then eventually, at some point in the not too distant future, things begin to compound and snowball. That’s what you’ve seen here, is the compounding nature of content marketing.
That’s how you do it, that’s how you grow an audience on the internet.
I’m doing it right now with my channel. I’m starting completely from scratch with a brand new channel to prove it again. I’ve already proved it with my other channels, but I want to continuously show people that they can do it for free. They don’t have to buy into these get rich, hype-y, scammy nonsense or pyramid schemes. They can grow a business if they’re prepared to put in the work and be consistent with it.