Do it together!

This message is so simple, common sense, and yet so often ignored when it shouldn’t be: no matter whether you try to reach your personal (career) development goals or whether you want to start your own business, your own motivation is the key to success.

The other day I took this short 15 minute course titled Get It Done: Surprising Lessons from Motivation Science on LinkedIn. It stated 5 things that are important for people’s motivation, as empirical evidence shows. Two of these things made most sense to me: One thing was that you should create a fun path to that goal and the other thing is that you should do it together with other people.

A funny aspect of this is actually that this aspect to motivation also applies to achieving learning goals and these LinkedIn courses actually do not offer any interaction between learners or the teacher. So I took a course that actually said more or less that the system the course is running on is not doing that essential part well 🙂

It is possible to offer online courses for the masses and still encourage interaction between the participants. The Coursera system e.g. has these capabilities. The song writing course I took there once was the most fun large-scale online course i have done so far and that was mostly because the learners gave each other feedback on the assignments / exercises.

But also when it comes to starting your own business, the business plan and your commitment to it is often just not enough. I experienced this myself a couple of years back. So try to find people that want to be in this together with you. Use the networking capabilities out there as well as the coaching offered along with the financial support.