Transcript continued from the Episode 065 Show notes
Interview with Guest Dr. Jason Jones
Mark: I am super excited to finally be on the mic with a guy that I’ve known for well over a year, getting on to two years now, Dr. Jason Jones.
How are you Dr. Jones?
Dr. Jones: I’m doing great.
Mark: Does that make you feel fancy when I call you Dr. Jones?
Dr. Jones: Not really. Maybe it embarrasses me a little bit.
Mark: You hold the PhD, correct?
Dr. Jones: That’s right, a PhD in Psychology.
Mark: You hold a PhD in Psychology and your area of focus, at least recently, has been motivation?
Dr. Jones: That’s right. It’s actually been more than recently. I started my doctoral work back in 1997 and that’s where I took my interest in why people do what they do, motivation, and things like that. I actually put together my own trap for my doctoral program in psychology. I spent most of that four years or so in graduate school and my graduate program specifically researching why people do what they do in a business environment.
Mark: That’s perfect, because I want to talk to you about motivation. So that works out for us today.
Dr. Jones: All right.
Mark: Before we get to that and maybe go through some of your qualifications, we have to tell people how we met. We’re on Skype – how far away from each other would you say we are at this moment?
Dr. Jones: First of all, I don’t exactly what house you live in, but I know the street you live on. We’re probably five blocks.
Mark: Maybe, at the most five blocks. I guess we met as a result of podcasting, right?
Dr. Jones: That’s right. I was searching out podcasts, as I do, and I heard your name a couple of times through Cliff Ravenscraft’s podcast, and I think a few others. I had no idea that you lived even near me. I thought you were maybe like one of these other guys in California or Florida. Then I heard you lived in Texas, so that intrigued me.
Mark: And then come to find out that it’s five blocks away.
Dr. Jones: I remember the email I sent that said, “Hey, I live in the Dallas area as well, I’m actually out north.” I think you emailed back and said, “I’m out north, too.” I said something like, “I’m in Allen.” Then you emailed me back, “I’m in Allen, too.” I think we narrowed it all the way down to the neighborhood.
Mark: That’s exactly right, I remember that quite well. That was great.
Dr. Jones: Our kids go to school together.
Mark: That’s right. I’ve seen you up at the elementary school. It’s a small world.
The reason that I have been wanting to get you on the show for a long time is because I think a lot of people that listen to this show – it’s certainly true for me – have a day job and they are trying to do something on the side, or they are somehow trying to build something from nothing, they’re starting up this small business.
Whether you’re working in the margins of your life, like I am trying to do something late at night, or you’re doing this thing full time, if you’re a solo entrepreneur it takes a lot of what I’m going to call motivation. I’ve noticed over the years that my motivation sometimes is huge and sometimes it’s less huge.
I know you’ve noticed and my listeners notice, my podcasting consistency sometimes is not what I want it to be. I know some of that goes to motivation. So I thought what better thing to do than to spend some time with an expert talking about motivation in a way that’s relevant and practical for solo entrepreneurs.
Dr. Jones: Very good. In my mind, motivation is the crux of psychology. You think about all of the things that we hear about from psychology, if you take a psychology class in college, whatever it might be, it all boils down to why we do what we do as humans and what drives us to ultimately behave in the way that we behave. You can boil all of that down to our motives.
That’s what drives me. I have just this deep curiosity to understand why we do what we do from a global standpoint, how we do life and why our personalities are the way they are. Also, when you think about the different scenarios and situations you’re in throughout life, sometimes you may be motivated by it and you want to take action and other times you don’t and you’re not motivated at all with it. To me that’s fascinating.
Mark: At the very simplest level it occurs me that every time I do anything it’s because I’ve been motivated to do it, whether it’s answer the phone and I’m motivated to stop the ringing, or buy a new house because I’m motivated to improve my situation. I’ve got some motivation to change the television channel. This is true at all levels, right?
Dr. Jones: Everything you do is motivated by something, if you think about it. Everything you do. Sometimes that motivation is a little more thoughtful and it’s something that goes through a process of thinking about it and connecting it with what we want an outcome to be, either immediate or down the road.
Other times it’s much more physiological. You think about when you get thirsty, you go get a glass of water because you’re thirsty. There’s a motive there. You scratch your head because you have an itch, there’s a motive there.
Any behavior we do, there is some motive for why we do that, there’s an outcome that we’re trying to achieve.
Mark: That obviously makes sense as soon as you think about it. A lot of your focus has been specifically motivation in business. Can you talk a little bit about why motivation is important in business and why you would want to spend time thinking about that?
Dr. Jones: Certainly. Going back to why we do what we do, there are a lot of applications for this in business. If you are a business owner, you want to think about how you can be a good leader, how you can be good in your business and run a good business. If you have employees, you want to think about and understand how you can motivate them to give their best to engage in what you’re doing and perform at their highest level.
Think about your customers. You want to know how to motivate your customers to take action if you want them to buy something, if you want them to contract your services.
I think the biggest application of all is as we look at it personally and to better understand ourselves to know, “How can I self regulate myself so that I can have a relatively high level of motivation and have that for long periods of time?” Essentially, “How can I have a healthy level of motivation most of the time?”
I think everyone knows and you’ve all experienced high levels of motivation and you’ve experienced low levels of motivation. We would all prefer to have high levels of motivation most of the time, I believe.
Think, what are the things that come along with high levels of motivation? You think of confidence, excitement, joy, engagement, focus in your work, high expectation, goal mindset. There are so many great emotional states that come along with being motivated.
One of the things that I’ve looked at through my research and the research of others is trying to determine what is it in our work environments that keeps us motivated and keep us with this healthy level of motivation. When I talk about motivation, I’m talking more of the healthy perspective, not the command and control fear, manipulation, and that type of motivation, that I’m sure we’ve all had to experience to some extent.
We know that motivation is fleeting. When we don’t have the person who is putting us under the fear or we don’t have the situation where we we’re not under someone’s control that may be trying to put this negative motivation on us, then we know we’re not motivated, it dies out and we don’t continue to behave in that way.
I think in a business environment many people are realizing that if I’m going to keep myself motivated, if I’m going to keep others motivated so that we all enjoy what we’re doing, we’re all performing highly, we’re all being successful, we have to focus on how to have that positive motivation and sustain that.
Another way to look at this, too, is that you don’t want to have these roller coaster type emotions and roller coaster motivation, which means you have very high highs and then you have low lows. What ends up happening there is you feel great at the high and you do everything you can to stay up there, but oftentimes they higher you go then the lower you go as well.
We want to look at this more as rolling hills. Obviously there’s some lull that we experience with our motivation, but we also want to have that higher level of motivation over a long period of time so that it’s sustaining. When we do that, it sustains our performance as well.
Mark: I know that people in sports a lot of times will talk about something similar. I’ve heard Tiger Woods and Jack Nicholas both talk about how they try not to get too upset when they make a really bad shot and not to get too pumped up when they make an amazing shot, they’re just trying to stay on an even keel. That’s the kind of analogy that that makes me think of.
Let me ask you, as a guy who studies motivation, the kind of stuff you’re talking about seems to me a little bit different than some of the more superficial discussions that I hear where it’s “go rah-rah” motivational speaker type stuff. You’re really talking more about the fundamental aspects of motivation. That makes me think you probably get into a little bit more of what works and what actually doesn’t work.
Can you talk a little bit and expand on this idea that the stuff that really works in the long term is the positive motivation, not the negative motivation? Can you expand on that a little more?
Dr. Jones: Yes. I call this motivation madness. We’re now in 2013 and we’ve had more than 100 years of psychology, of theories, even before William James and Sigmund Freud. They spent a lot of their time thinking about what drives us, why we do what we do. Before that we had Socrates and Plato, a millennia ago, asking the same questions, “Why do we do what we do as humans? How can we understand each other better? How can we understand what we do?”
Then over the last 100 years you have all of these different theories that are out there. Some of them had some decent research behind them, most of it was very observational, but they weren’t highly scientific like we have been able to get to over the last 15 or so years.
You might say, “How is it highly scientific now and it wasn’t then?” The interesting thing now is that we have such easy access to be able to validate theories and actually research people now than we have ever had before. Our ability for computers to crunch data is faster, easier, and better. Our access to people is better than it ever has been, with the advent of the internet. We can now look at getting samples.
When you want to validate a theory, you want to validate it to all human beings, you don’t want to just validate it to western civilization or people in the United States, you have to look at it across all ethnic groups, people from every background all over the world on all continents, so you can really understand is this a phenomena of a certain area of the world or is this true of all humans. That’s where you’ve seen the research go over the last 15 years or so, 20 years maybe.
You have things like Maslow’s Hierarchy of Need, which gave so much to us for understanding humans and people, and it was accepted for so long. Over the last 15 years or so it has been disproven. We like to say that we have to take care of our basic needs before we’re motivated to self-fulfillment, but it just does not hold water anymore. We know that people actually pursue self-fulfillment before other even lower needs, according to Maslow, have been met.
Think about Ross McGinnis, December 4, 2006 in Afghanistan. He’s in a HMMWV with four of his buddy and they’re patrolling in a pretty safe area. Out of the blue someone throws an unpinned grenade inside the vehicle. Psychologists 50, 60, 70 years ago would say the number one thing is about saving your life, survival, and also the hedonism. Outside of a survival situation seeking pleasure is our biggest motive. We know that’s not true. Ross McGinnis jumped on the grenade and essentially took the grenade on himself and saved all four of his buddies.
This type of example of someone throwing themselves on a grenade has actually been documented 41 times since WWII. It shows you that we live for something more than just survival. We live for things that are meaningful, we live for things that we value, we live for people. We make decisions sometimes in a split second that are about how we want to live our lives.
You think about Ross McGinnis, he hit self-fulfillment during that time, but he wasn’t taking care of his safety needs.
Mark: His basic needs were not met by the hand grenade.
Dr. Jones: That’s exactly right. Think about B.F. Skinner. A lot of things we’ve had in business psychology and how to boost motivation and engagement has been around, “How do we recognize and reward people?” Some of that is great and that’s good stuff, I think that needs to be there, we need to reward people, we need to recognize people when they do good things. But is that all there is?
For a long time people bought into B.F. Skinner’s behaviorism; if you want to continue an activity or if you want an activity to be sustained or even to start, you find a way to enforce it with something. B.F. Skinner worked with animals, he worked with pigeons. Problem is, we’re not animals, we’re not pigeons. Some people say we’re animals to some extent, but we’re not pigeons. We have a higher level of what we call meta-cognition and we can think about our own thinking and make our own conscious choices.
The problem is we’ve seen now, especially during the ‘80s and ‘90s, a satiation of all these rewards and recognitions in the business environment in that it’s not enough. You can get paid a whole lot of money, but if you don’t like what you do, if it’s not meaningful, your level of engagement, your level of motivation, and your satisfaction with what you do goes down. There has to be something more there.
A couple of pieces of research that I’ll mention here. Steven Reiss and his theory called Basic Desires Theory, which has to do with our basic values and desires, very internal, there are 16 of desires. Things like acceptance, curiosity, family, idealism, order in our lives and how we like things to be, power, which is about our influence and our wanting to lead, social contact, vengeance around competition, status and our desire for prestige and social standing. He has a theory of these 16 desires and it is the most researched, confirmatory factor analysis over the last 10 years, best stuff that I’ve seen out there that really explains these intrinsic motivators that drive us as humans.
Now, my theory and what I teach, motivate to engage, and I teach this in a business standpoint, I couple that because there is another theory called Self Determination Theory by Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, and a lot of people know of their work through Daniel Pink’s book Drive.
Mark: Sure, I’ve read that book.
Dr. Jones: That has been very popular, it’s gotten a lot of press. Actually, to show you how far I go back, Daniel Pink wrote his book in 2010, I wrote my dissertation validating that theory in 2002. So I was one of the first to actually validate that theory in a business standpoint looking at performance outcomes, looking at someone’s level of motivation and being able to predict their level of performance on the job.
It’s a great book. I highly suggest the book Drive, I think it gives great insights. Dan is a prolific writer, he’s a very gifted writer. But I do believe that there are several missing pieces.
In my research and especially the stuff that I’ve done on my own where we’re looking at this Basic Desires Theory and we’re also looking at this concept of Self Determination Theory, when they’re put together and you look at both of these things together, you see a cycle of motivation that first is internal with us. What’s meeting our unique needs that makes meaning for us, our unique desires that we all have that make meaning for us, and then you couple with an environment that’s supportive, then you have a great cycle of motivation for ourselves. If we put ourselves in the right environment and we’re in a situation where we’re able to move towards our basic desires and needs, we have a great opportunity to really be in a highly motivational state.
Mark, you’ve been in a situation before where you have been highly motivated because you’re doing something that meets one of your basic desires. I’m going to say for you one of the basic desires that you are strong in would be probably idealism. That is you want to improve society, you want to help other people out, you want to help people build their businesses.
Mark: Sure.
Dr. Jones: I also would say that you probably have high power as well, which is you like to lead and you want to influence others.
Mark: Yes.
Dr. Jones: I’m even going to throw in there a little bit of status. If you’re okay with that?
Mark: Sure. I’m comfortable with that, I know who I am.
Dr. Jones: Certainly people high in status, some of them like to find their status and maybe drive in an expensive car or something like that, or maybe wear an expensive status. That’s one way to find status. Other ways to find status are things like what you do, and what like many of your listeners are doing, and that’s trying to build a business, trying to be able to known for something. It’s about having the standing among your peers and that type of thing.
When you look at those, and let’s say you’re working on something that hits those areas and you’re excited about it and you’re motivated about it, if you put yourself in an environment with people and all of a sudden they kill it or they’re not supportive of it, your motivation is going to tend to go down.
If you put yourself in an environment where people are like, “Mark, that’s a great idea. I think that’s awesome what you’re doing. How can I help you? How can we keep you going on this?” Then your motivation is going to go upward or sustain and probably boost to a higher level.
Mark: That starts to get to what I think a lot of people that are listening to this now want to hear about, which is if they are that person who is building that business, how do these seemingly esoteric psychology theories funnel down into a guy or gal who is trying to build their own business and stay motivated to do that? How does that map into practical advice that people can use to improve their own motivation?
Dr. Jones: That’s where we always want to get this discussion. Theory sometimes is fun, but you want to get it to, “What does this mean for us?”
By the way, if anyone wants to know more about these 16 desires, there is a great book that Steven Reiss actually wrote called The Normal Personality. You can find that on Amazon, but also on my website you can learn more about that.
When you think from the environment standpoint, I have a framework that I use, the acronym is actually FRAME, and I use work on the back of that as a good reminder to people who are building their business or leading in business. Look for your FRAME or build your FRAME environment.
F – Freedom,
R – Relationships,
A – Ability,
M – Meaning,
E – Energy.
What you’re wanting to do is look for these components or build these components in all your environments. The better that you can do that, the better you’re going to be able to support your natural motivation.
I say that from a framework standpoint to think about, but let’s talk about how we make that practical and how we put that into practice.
The first thing that I would say is baseline here, if you want to optimize your motivation you need to have the best health that you can have. If you think about motivation, your motivation is psychology energy that drives purposeful behavior. The healthier that you can be as a person, exercising often, eating as well as you can, the more you’re going to be able to optimize the motivation you already have. I think that’s very important. That’s step 0 in my mind.
Mark: I read your blog and you would have me take vitamins too, wouldn’t you?
Dr. Jones: Yes.
Mark: Including some I’ve never even heard of.
Dr. Jones: There are some great vitamins. There’s a lot of stuff out there and I advise people don’t take anything unless they look at it. The vitamins that I suggest are things that your doctor would talk to you about and say, “These are good things,” because they are very research based and they’re standard. Not these things that may work for some people and don’t work for others. Certainly you can check that out.
Mark: I was being facetious, you’re very mainstream with your recommendations, I think. As I recall, it’s stuff like Omega 3 and Vitamin D3, and stuff like that, if I remember from the article I read.
Dr. Jones: The research on the vitamin D3 is pretty amazing over the last few years. We all are lacking that vitamin D3 and we all need more of it. It’s a big thing for our energy. You think about your personal energy and how that effects your motivation, if you’re exhausted at the end of the day it’s going to be hard for you to be pretty motivated to work on your business.
Mark: This happens to me. I get home and I’m exhausted after a big job all day long. It’s easier to sit on the couch and shut off than it is to get in here and crank up this microphone and do something that matters.
Dr. Jones: Yes. That’s why we go back to this how do you create mental or psychological energy.
One of the things I would say is revisit your meaning, why you’re doing what you’re doing. Even write that down. I think sometimes we have to watch it, because we can easily start pursuing money or pursuing other things to be our motivator.
Here’s the thing. Money as a motivator is only a vehicle for what you’re trying to get to. We forget that. Think about do you do anything to get some green pieces of paper?
Mark: Right, it’s a tool.
Dr. Jones: And a lot of times it’s a concrete way to think about, if you think about these 16 desires, we have a higher level of tranquility or maybe we feel like we can get more status or have more power with it, or we can take care of our family, or we feel like it can help us give back to people and help us with our idealism and that type of thing. We have to remember that it’s just a vehicle.
In most cases, if it’s an extrinsic type of motivator, it’s just a vehicle to get you eventually to the ends, which is your intrinsic motivators of the 16 desires and values that I mentioned. Anything that you see that you think you’re moving towards an extrinsic motivator, think about what’s deeper than that. That actually helps you then better be more motivated to what your outcomes that you’re really trying to achieve and why you do what you do what you do.
When you think about why to get up off the couch and go work on something, what’s it for? What are you trying to do? That’s something to think about.
I think also planning your progress and your accomplishments. I think overwhelm is a big thing for people when we get stuck and we lose our motivation. I don’t know if you see that, Mark, especially when you’re building an online business. I know as I’m building a platform online myself, although I don’t have a product business or anything like that, I still have a blog and I’m building a platform online, and it can be overwhelming when you think of all the things you need to do or should be doing. That in itself sometimes can hinder our motivation.
You ever experience that, Mark?
Mark: Oh, yes. The simple way I describe it is so much to do, just the noise in my head of the list of things that I want to go do is so overwhelming that I can’t even decide what to work on first. You just have this feeling of wanting to give up and say, “Oh never mind, let’s go watch NCIS.”
Dr. Jones: Planning your progress and planning your accomplishments, there’s a great book called The Progress Principle. I love this book. Actually, one of the Harvard Business Professors was a coauthor of this, it’s by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer.
Essentially in their research what they found when they looked at these people in business, several thousand people I think it was, they found higher levels of joy in their work, engagement in their work, and creativity in their work was predicted by a person at the end of each day feeling like they made a little bit more progress towards an ultimate goal, and how important that is for us. We’re not going to eat the elephant in one sitting, right? Can we give ourselves permission to do 1% a day or do 0.5% a day, and let that progress principle take over where we know we’re making progress and we’re seeing it accumulating?
If you’ve read the book The Compound Effect, that’s another book that talks about it from a theoretical perspective. A little bit every day will add up to a lot over time, something that we can be proud of. I think that’s a big thing for our motivation as well.
Mark: So when I tell my listeners, which I always have since I’ve had this podcast, that they should work on their internet business a little bit every day, there’s actually some science behind that?
Dr. Jones: Exactly.
Mark: Hey, how about that?
Dr. Jones: You’re a scientist and you didn’t know it.
Mark: That’s right.
Dr. Jones: I think people find this book really interesting, The Progress Principle. There’s some good stuff in there.
I’ll give you two more that I have in mind.
The other thing is, related to the relationships that I mentioned in the framework, as well as energy, and that is find people to be with. Find a buddy, find a friend, find a group of people that you share common goals with, common challenges, common failures, common successes. This is the great thing about podcasts, you can find a podcast on anything you’re interested in and find likeminded people.
Mark, you connect with your listeners and we’ve met down the street here at The Londoner Pub with people from all over Texas, we had people drive from another state, I think.
Mark: That’s true.
Dr. Jones: It’s people that just want to get together and talk about how we’re building our platform and things like that all align. I know everybody walks away from that highly motivated.
Although, that’s an event. How do we do that on a daily basis? That could be done through continual reading, your development, podcasts. I think it strengthens it if you do have similar to the buddy system here, you have a relationship with someone who is doing some of the same things and you can encourage each other on.
Whenever you’ve fallen off the wagon a little bit, someone is there to push you back on and say, “Hey, how’s it going? I haven’t seen you in awhile. How are you progressing towards your goal?” and to give you a little encouragement here and there. That can be a big thing for us.
Mark: I talk about this a little bit in Episode 63 where I talk about mastermind groups, which is another example of how you can get this kind of motivation.
Dr. Jones: Yes, I think a mastermind is a great example of this. Even if it’s to the level of a mastermind group, even some type of peer mentoring group. You’re seeing more and more of those popping up, especially in business environments or in corporations, where likeminded people who have some of the same type of goals are getting together and they’re helping each other. They’re essentially developing each other and they’re coaching each other, they’re mentoring each other. That’s a highly effective way to keep your motivation moving.
Mark: Excellent.
Dr. Jones: The last thing I’ll mention here is just studying yourself. Thinking about what motivates you and getting to know yourself a little bit better, building in what I call these motivation practices. There is a ton of books out there related to motivation techniques, tips, 101 ways to motivate. Some of those work for some people and they don’t work for others. I encourage people to think about yourself, get to know yourself, what truly is your meaning, your values, those desires, what is it around that that motivates, and then how do you implement that into your life in a workable way.
These motivation practices for me are things like my time management. I avoid overworking so I don’t burn out, which I think is a big problem with people who own their own businesses, getting to the burn out stage too quickly. How do you manage your time and monitoring yourself?
It’s like running a marathon. A business is not a sprint. Some people go out and they think they’re going to run this marathon of their business and they’re going to go out and start sprinting their first two miles. What happens? You want to give up at the two mile marker.
Mark: Absolutely.
Dr. Jones: Think about how to avoid that burn out, how you can manage your time, how you can actually work on your business when you have energy, that natural energy. Is it in the morning? Is it in the afternoon? Is it in the evening? That type of thing.
How do you implement exercise and health into what you’re doing? Going back to some of the rewards, what do you do to reward yourself? What do you do to put yourself around the right people and put yourself in the right environment?
There are a lot of people who, quite frankly, have the wrong friends or are in the wrong environment to do anything to help their motivation and move them forward. Some people may need to rethink that.
I could go on, but for the sake of time those are just some examples of personal motivation practices that you can put into practice every day.
Sorry for the shameless plug here, but on my blog I actually have an ebook that I wrote and I give away.
Mark: The Five Habits of Maximum Motivation. I was about to mention that, because I’ve actually read that, it’s outstanding.
Dr. Jones: It’s a way to remind us of what we need to be doing every day to keep that motivation as high as we can in an actual way and it has to do with those motivation practices.
Mark: Let’s be very specific. How can people go and find that ebook and you. It’s not just the ebook, there’s lots of interesting stuff on your blog that stretches from health to I saw earlier this week that you wrote a piece about motivational emails. There’s just all kinds of relevant information over there. Where can they find you?
Dr. Jones: You can find me at DrJasonJones.com. You’ll see on the right side of the screen the opt-in form where you can get The Five Habits of Maximum Motivation ebook that we just mentioned.
Also, I’ve written a published book called 28 Days to a Motivated Team, which is written as a handbook for someone who manages people to help increase motivation for their work team. You might find some interesting things there.
Let me give you a couple of little links here to get your listeners if they want to go directly to some things. You know when you go to someone’s blog there’s just a lot of stuff at times.
Mark: Yes, absolutely.
Dr. Jones: If you go to DrJasonJones.com/motivation that’s going to take you to a place that kind of curates some of the top posts that I’ve provided related to some of the things I’ve talked about here, about motivation and this framework, and how you can put that together. That will curate together if you want a crash course in motivation, you can go to that.
Also, if you want to go directly to where you can sign up and get the 5 Habits book, you can go to DrJasonJones.com/5habits.
Mark: Outstanding. This has been even better than I hoped, there’s actionable stuff here. The things that resonate with me have to do with maybe getting myself into a little bit better shape for maximum energy. That’s certainly something that I’m focused on right now.
I imagine that a lot of people will come away from listening to this with stuff to go do. What’s your advice for someone who recognizes that they have a gap in where they want to be as far as motivation is concerned and they want to change something tomorrow? They’ve listened to this, they’ve got this high level theory, some practical recommendations, and now they just want to take some small action. What’s the nugget or the sound bite that you want to leave people with about motivation?
Dr. Jones: I’ll give you some wisdom out of what I’ve studied over the past 15 – 20 years now with this. The first thing is don’t look for people to motivate you. As a matter of fact, what we know about motivation is that it’s not about instilling it, it’s about activating it. Look to find how you can activate your own motivation and don’t look to other people to try to instill it in you.
The first thing that I would say to anyone is that there is great power in goals and meaning. If you can combine those goals and meaning, that’s going to be your first step towards your action and towards you getting some kind of psychological energy to actually behave and act with purpose, to move forward with purpose.
When I talk about activating, I coach people and teach people when I train this to think about how do you unleash that internal drive and energy about the things that are most important to you, most meaningful to you, and put that into some type of goal for how you’re going to move towards that. A lot of people are doing that in their daily jobs, they can do that in how they’re working with their families, they can do that in their local communities, in their churches, in their synagogues. There are so many ways that we can move forward with that.
If you can just begin moving forward in any of those places, I think you’ll see how that will expand and actually blossom into really finding many other ways in life to continue to activate your motivation.
Mark: Dr. Jones, that sounds like excellent advice that I need to follow myself. I really can’t thank you enough for spending time to talk with me and my listeners tonight. I really appreciate it. I know people will and I hope people will reach out to you at DrJasonJones.com. You’re also @DrJasonJones on Twitter, so people can find you there.
Dr. Jones: That’s right.
Mark: I encourage people if they’ve got questions or comments about the show, I’d love to hear about those in the comments for the show notes. I’m sure you’ll be watching those and will chime in if needed, because we’ll be out of my depth on this topic pretty quickly.
Dr. Jones: I certainly will. Mark, thanks for the opportunity. You do good work. Thanks for all that you do for the people all around the world that are up late at night working on their business, as you say one night at a time, little by little, on their way to doing great things.
Mark: Thanks. I appreciate that. I’ll see you around the neighborhood. Take care.
Dr. Jones: All right. Thanks, Mark.
Mark: Bye.
Wrapping Things Up…
That was totally awesome. That should give you a strong feeling for a guy who is well qualified and who has been studying this stuff all of his life. What he’s telling you is intrinsic motivation is key. You need to think about why you’re doing things. It’s exactly 100% aligned with the kind of stuff that we’ve talked about on the show before.
I think it’s important because when I see people fail in internet marketing, they don’t fail because of tactics or a lack of tactics, they don’t fail because they don’t have strategy. There’s lot of stuff you can go out there and just buy. They fail because they quit, because they’re not motivated, because they don’t see things through. This intrinsic motivation thing is something you really need to figure out if you want to be successful in internet business.
Until next time, I’m Mark Mason from the Late Night Internet Marketing Podcast and I hope you have an absolutely highly motivated, fantastic day.
