Jeff Haden
Appearances
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Probably the biggest gap or the biggest hurdle that people have to cross when you want to start something new is you are starting at a place of no experience, no expertise. You're kind of at the zero spot in most cases. And so if you look ahead to where you want to go, that bridge that you have to cross is incredibly daunting because it's like, okay, I'm just this.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
How am I going to get all the way over there? And so if you're constantly focused on that end place, then even little successes that you make early on, which you tend to do because you're new, so you learn quickly and you gain some skill fairly fast, they're meaningless to you because compared to what you think you want to be someday, well, it's nothing. And so...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
The biggest thing for me is, you know, because I struggled with the first few things I wrote, but then I thought, and I would think to myself, how am I ever going to be able to do this? Because it takes me way too long. I'm creating decent things, but gosh, it takes forever, and there's no way for me to make this work. And then I thought, well...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Okay, but I can't sit down and think, okay, I'm going to be Malcolm Gladwell tomorrow or something like that. But what I can do is just work really hard on whatever is in front of me. And so I switched over and just said, my goal every time I do something is, all right, I have this to do. I need to do it as well as I can. I need to finish it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
I need to get good feedback from it, which means I did a good job. Because whether I thought I did a good job didn't really matter. It's what the client thought. And that's all I can do right now. But that's enough. And so if I stack enough of those experiences up, then the experience kind of comes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And so by keeping a short time horizon in terms of my inner feedback loop, then if I worked on a project one night and it was a short one and I got it done, That felt really good because I set out to do what I wanted to do. I completed a task. It went well. That was enough to get me to the next one. And so I just fell into this place of all I need is enough motivation to get to the next one.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And if I get to the next one and I get to the next one, then suddenly you can look back and go, wow, I'm starting to come a long way because I'm. You know, you pop your head up every once in a while and sort of look at where you are and go, wow, that is really cool. And then you need to put your head right back down again and just focused on next and next and next. And so.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And then the other part of it is that I'm not particularly smart. I have a college degree, but I'm not particularly educated. I don't have anything. There's nothing. I'm decidedly average. Let's just say that. I don't think that's true, but okay. Well, I don't have anything special going for me except for the fact that I realize that if I put in enough effort, there are a lot of things I can do.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And so I'm very much an effort kind of a person. And so... That actually works really well because I don't think you get motivation from like this. I'm sitting around one day and suddenly I have the lightning bolt that says I want to be a famous writer or whatever it is you want to be. That doesn't work. I don't think that kind of motivation. I don't know anybody that has that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
All you really need is to say, I'm interested in writing. Let me get started in some fashion. And through effort, if you work hard at it, you improve, because we always get better at things we work hard at. It is a natural thing. It's just like taxes. It's a law of the universe. And whenever you get a little better, that feels good.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And so effort equals a little bit of achievement, which feels good, which creates motivation for you to take a little more effort, which means you'll improve a little more, which feels good. And so there's this really cool virtuous cycle of effort, achievement, fulfillment, happiness, motivation that you can spend forever and ever and ever if you focus on doing it that way.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
If all you care about is this big end result, It's demoralizing and defeating and you have to rely on willpower alone and none of us have enough willpower to do that. But if you just get that cycle started, there it is. So to me, motivation doesn't come first, effort comes first.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
So process really is everything with anything that you want to do. So you do need a big goal, I think. But your goal, your big goal is just there to help you design the process that you would use in order to get there. So if I... This is a terrible, well, it's not a terrible example, but it's an easy example. Say you want to run a marathon and you've never run before.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
So running the marathon is your big goal. But as you said, if that's all you focus on is being able to run 26 miles and you can only run one, you're going to quit because it's too far. And you feel bad after that one mile, you're never going to get there.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Running a marathon, though, you can back it up and say, OK, what are the steps and stages that I'm going to have to go through in order to build up the endurance and stamina and speed and all that other stuff that will allow me to get there? And there are plenty of people in the world who can lay that program out for you. So you know what to do. So the goal informs the process.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Then you just say, okay, I've got a, whatever it is, six-month plan. What's tomorrow? Tomorrow is I'm going to go run a mile and a half. Cool. When you run the mile and a half, you can check it off.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
You get to feel good about yourself because you did what you set out to do that day, which if you think about it at the end of the day, the days you feel best about yourself are when you got done the things that you said you wanted to do. Where you feel bad is when you didn't. So you get to feel good about it. You checked it off. You had a successful day.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
That will give you enough motivation to tomorrow go, okay, what's tomorrow? Whatever it is, that's all you have to do. You just have to do whatever it is that you have to do today. And if you focus on that, you get to be successful every day. You get to feel good about yourself every day.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And you will stack up enough of those days that every once in a while you will pop your head up and say, wow, I just did a 10-mile run. Who thought I could do that? But before you get too excited and go, oh, what about the 26? You got to put your head back down because you're not there yet. And then you say, cool, I can run 10 miles. That's awesome. What's tomorrow?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
Tomorrow may only be a three mile run because that's part of your process of recovery and whatever else it may be. Whatever it is, if you're doing what you set out to do that day and if that goal is or if that process is designed so that it will basically guarantee that if you put in the effort, you will succeed. You're good to go. So the goal informs the process.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
And then all you worry about is, am I doing what I need to do each step of the way? You didn't start a side hustle and end up with 35 people working for you by one day just saying, you know, that's what I want to do. You knew you wanted to create a marketing agency and a podcast. You knew what you wanted to do. But you broke it down into, okay, but what can I do right now?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
How to Stay Motivated and Avoid Burnout as a Content Creator | Presented by OpusClip | YAPCreator
What am I doing each day to get there? And then all of those wins stacked up on themselves and probably made it a little bit easier for you to keep working that hard because you saw a path to where you were going to go.