How to find motivation when rewards are nowhere in sight

Originally published by Scott Belsky on LinkedIn: How to find motivation when rewards are nowhere in sight

Short-circuit your reward system.

One of the greatest motivators is a sign of progress. Hardship is easier to tolerate when your work is being recognized (either through external validation or financial rewards), but long journeys don’t show progress in the traditional sense. When you have no customers, no audience, and nobody knows or cares to know about what you’re making, the greatest mo­tivators have to be manufactured.

I would characterize much of my first few years leading my team at Behance as an ad­venture in manufacturing motivation. In 2007, and for a few years thereafter, we had very little traction, revenue, press, or any other traditional form of progress to celebrate. We had launched a blog and simple network for creative professionals... that nobody knew about or cared about. When you did a web search for Behance, the first result was Did you mean: enhance? Even Google thought we were a mistake.

The traditional measures of an internet business—page views, customers, subscribers, revenue—didn’t do much for us because we were starting from nothing and struggling to exist. As the team’s leader, I tried all sorts of ways to keep the team engaged. We would make bets for when we would achieve certain milestones based on our priorities. As a life­long vegetarian, I would commit to trying certain kinds of meat if we reached certain milestones (which the team found, strangely, motivating). We would celebrate any new cus­tomers, even if the overall numbers were tiny. We would celebrate completing a page of tasks on the wall or bashing a particularly elusive bug in the software with cheap cham­pagne. Whatever we could repurpose as a milestone, we would.

One of my favorite early manufactured milestones was overcoming Google’s Behance/enhance error message. We longed to be considered a legitimate search result. To achieve this, we needed to game the spread of “back links” to influence Google’s search algorithm. We knew that the more blog posts we wrote and the more portfolios our customers uploaded, the closer we would get to internet recognition, not by our customers, but by Google’s digi­tal gatekeepers. The goal was short term, and the tasks to achieve it were all actionable. It would just take time and effort. “Someday,” I assured the team, “we will no longer be a mistake.”

Then one day, someone on the team went to Google and gave it another go and, lo and behold, Behance came up as the first result without any prompt to correct the search query. We had won—we finally existed! It was a small win manufactured as a way to help us feel a semblance of progress, but it felt great.

And then, I kid you not, in 2008, Beyoncé became popular. And we were a mistake again. Did you mean: Beyoncé? Google asked. But we were undeterred, and it was only a matter of weeks until we were, once again, a legitimate search result.

It is hard to summon a sense of hope and self-worth when you’re on your own. So you squeeze out any semblance of progress you can find, and then you celebrate it.

The great void of feedback and reward that early-stage start-ups must endure cannot be overstated. It is especially apparent when I attend start‑up conferences like Web Sum­mit, an annual gathering of start-ups from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. While the United States has an established ecosystem of start-ups, incubators, venture-capital firms, and angel investors, the rest of the world benefits from megaconferences like Web Summit to bring entrepreneurs and investors together. Strolling around the start‑up pavilion at Web Summit, I always take heart in the literally thousands of start-ups who have a three-foot-long space to engage anyone willing to hear their pitch.

It’s fun to see so many ideas in the early stages, but with all the energy I also feel the pain and despair. When you’re putting everything on the line, your business and art becomes intertwined with your identity and self-esteem. Nothing is more humbling than everyone passing by your three-foot cube that represents your future without even taking a second look.

Anonymity means you can make mistakes and drastic changes to your product without disappointing anyone, but only because nobody cares. Breaking through anonymity is a game of endurance, so you have to hack your reward system so that the absent short-term rewards you typically rely on, like revenue or new customer goals, are replaced by some­thing else.

Starting at a very young age, we are trained to be governed by a powerful short-term reward system. As toddlers, we behave in ways that yield affection and instant gratification from our parents. In school, our learning is rewarded with good grades. And grades, we soon learn, yield the reward of approval from parents, teachers, and peers. When we enter the job market, we receive a monthly salary and bonuses. And as legendary venture capital­ist Fred Wilson paraphrased at the 99U conference: “The two greatest addictions in life are heroin and a weekly salary.”

Monica Mehta, author of The Entrepreneurial Instinct, studies the role of brain chem­istry in entrepreneurship. She explains in Entrepreneur, “With each success, our brain re­leases a chemical called dopamine. When dopamine flows into the brain’s reward pathway (the part responsible for pleasure, learning and motivation), we not only feel greater con­centration but are inspired to re‑experience the activity that caused the chemical release in the first place.” This guaranteed dopamine rush and the self-confidence it provides makes short-term rewards addicting. Alternatively, “Each time we fail, the brain is drained of dopamine, making it not only hard to concentrate but also difficult to learn from what went wrong.” Thus, physiologically, we’re hardwired to have a strong preference for actions, deci­sions, and projects likely to yield quick wins, because delayed gratification causes anxiety and discomfort.

If you consider how short life expectancy was in the dawn of humanity, it’s no surprise that we’re naturally biased toward short-term rewards. Even as late as the seventeenth century, average life expectancy in New England was twenty-five years of age, and 40 per­cent of people died before reaching adulthood. For early humanity, the prospect of spend­ing five or ten years working toward an eventual outcome, however great it might be, was just not rational. No wonder it is so difficult to stay engaged with a long-term goal, we are biologically wired to abandon such efforts in exchange for shorter-term rewards.

Our addiction to short-term validation is so ingrained that trying to defy it is hopeless. Accept this fact. While many people paint an incredible long-term vision for their teams, the prospect of long-term rewards is insufficient for long-term motivation. It is virtuous to aspire to these goals, but a noble venture is not exempt from the need to feel incremental progress and be rewarded for it. Rather than fight the need for short-term rewards, you must hack your reward system to provide them.

As you craft your team’s culture, lower the bar for how you define a “win.” Celebrate anything you can, from gaining a new customer to solving a particularly vexing problem. The problem with traditional rewards like money, which can be counted and accumulated, is that they require the least imagination. Make the most of the period in your journey when you must create your own rewards out of necessity. By doing so, you are engaging your team more dynamically than a raise or bonus ever will. Milestones that are directly corre­lated with progress are more effective motivators than anything else.

Scott Belsky is the author of The Messy Middle, from which this article is excerpted.