BudDIY Podcast – Episode 6 – On Motivation

Sometimes motivation is fickle and fleeting. Other times it is strong and overwhelming, and is the driving force that pushes through the deluge of mediocrity.

This last week for me was not the driving force, but the fleeting kind.

However, while I was working over the weekend I was reminded of my motivation, and it helped to pull me out of my malaise.

In this Episode I talk about my motivation in hopes to spark a conversation about what others find motivating to them.

Give it a listen here:

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Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the sixth episode of the BudDIY Podcast, where today, we’re going to talk about motivation. But before that, if you’re listening or watching on YouTube, please feel free to subscribe and hit that notification bell so you can know when new episodes are released. If you’re listening on the website, I just want to let you know we’re available on most podcasting platforms. Just search for the BudDIY Podcast. That’s B-U-D-D-I-Y. And then, if you’re listening on the podcast and you’ve never visited the website, please feel free to do that as well and leave me some feedback. It’s B-U-D-D-I-Y.net at buddiy.net.

So with that, let’s go ahead and jump into today’s topic, and that is on motivation. So this week, I want to get into a little bit of a real talk and how things have been going for me for the last week or so. And that is, I’ve not been very motivated now. I mean, I have stuck it out and I have done work and I have just gotten stuff done, because it’s what I need to do. I got things I got to get done, and so I’m going to get them done, but I’ve not really been happy. I’ve not really enjoyed the work. You don’t always have to enjoy work. You don’t always have to be happy. Sometimes you just got to get some crap done, and that’s how I felt like this last week was going. And I didn’t realize that my motivation was waning, until I re-remembered what was motivating me.

So that’s the question is, What’s motivating you to do things for yourself? Is it money? Is it philosophy? Is it this is the only thing you’ve ever done? Is it to learn new things? What is your motivating factor to want to do the things that you’re doing? And I feel like it’s really important and it’s something that you should figure out if you don’t know. And just keep reminding yourself every time you’re out staring at a barrel with boxes in it. You’re burning and you’re bored to death of putting boxes in this barrel for the last two hours.

So what is the thing that’s motivating you to do what you’re doing? Because I’ll tell you, I had that epiphany of what was re-motivating me while I was watching boxes burn. And all of a sudden, burning boxes didn’t matter anymore. I was like, this is just okay, whatever. Let’s do it. Whereas, literally two minutes before that I was like, ah, I don’t want to burn these boxes. And just, it’s like, it was a change. It was a total change. And the rest of the day that I was doing work that day on Saturday was just totally, didn’t matter. I was like, this has got to get done because this is where I’m going. And I was a lot more productive and I was a lot more happy in what I was doing.

So I just want to recap some of the things that are motivating to me to see if maybe there are similar things for you, or maybe change your perspective. And also to realize that sometimes we get down and we don’t necessarily know why and we’ve got to refill that motivation engine.

So for me, the motivation to do all of this is really a couple of different things. One is personal liberty, the ability to do what I want, when I want, how I want, the way that I want to do it. I want to live the life that I want to live on my own terms and not somebody else’s terms. And in order to do that, I have specific things that I need to accomplish.

One, I need to build a business that allows me the freedom and flexibility that I want. I don’t currently have that. I have a day job, I work for someone else, I have a nine to five. I have some flexibility in that and I love my job. I really do enjoy it as a software developer. I mean, thinking about it, my natural state as a person for the last 20 years, which has been the majority of my life, has been to sit in front of a computer or on a couch with my computer and program or reprogramming articles. Getting out and doing woodworking or fixing my truck or things of that nature are definitely not part of the natural part of me.

And, in fact, my mother comments all the time when I tell her about the latest project that I’m working on. It’s like, “Wow, I can’t believe my son is doing this, because he always commented that he was never going to do this growing up.” And that’s true. I would comment all the time that I did not want to do DIY things for myself. I wanted to pay somebody else to do them. And to be quite frank, I wish I could in all honesty, because sometimes they’d just get done faster and better to hire a professional. But at the same time, I don’t mind now because of my motivation.

One is the personal Liberty. Two is my kids, my daughters. Before I got married, I was stuck in the, I didn’t want to do DIY. But my wife likes to do DIY and I literally apologized to her over the weekend, because we were out doing stuff together for the entire day on Saturday. And we were both enjoying it. And I know it’s something that she wanted to do before we got married. And I apologized that we never did it and that when we when we did do it, I wasn’t necessarily the happiest person about doing it. And I genuinely felt bad for that, because I love my wife and I know that was a part of what she wanted in life was to do stuff around the house with her husband.

Now I get to fulfill that thing, that desire for her now and in the future. The last couple of years have been crazy having kids and we haven’t been able to do that. But that’s not something that originally I ever really wanted to do. And my kids have really changed that. My daughters.

Some perspective on what that means, because it might not be 100% obvious, is I grew up what I call, and this is not to throw shade on my parents at all. Love my parents, they’re the greatest, in my opinion, the greatest parents ever. I was a difficult child to raise and they raised me the best they knew how and in the system that they knew how, and I think they did a great job. But they raised me in what I call a suburban lifestyle. That’s what was designed for them and that’s what they knew how to raise me, because that’s how they were raised. So they raised me in that way. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. That’s just the way it was.

So what do I mean by that? And what I mean by that is they were, their system that is essentially designed in the United States today is you’re a cog in the economic machine. You go to school and you come out and you do work to continue to help the economy of the United States move forward. Again, not necessarily a bad thing. That’s just the way it is. And most people live their lives happy with that and that’s awesome. It’s just a different way of living than the way that I want to live.

And what I mean by that is I want, I don’t want to necessarily be reliant on the current economic engine that exists in the United States. Not from a prepper perspective and, we’re all going to die or something like that. I want to live the way that I want to live, and that means I can’t be reliant on the greater economic system.

I feel like I have to approach how I changed my thought process on this. And I feel like I can attribute that to my parents, and they did three real things. One is my mother helped me to always pay attention to money, and that even though she wouldn’t complain about some of the stuff that I spent on, she would always advise me to analyze what I’m spending money on and to think about my income and outgo.

Another thing is my dad would often talk about starting a business and different ideas about businesses. We never started a business, so learning entrepreneurship and starting and running a business has been totally a from-scratch learning experience for me, because I had no one to talk to and have no one to discuss how to even go about starting and running a business. So there’s that.

And then finally, joining Boy Scouts. Boy Scouts gave me the opportunity to learn, to learn how to teach people and to be able to interact with a bunch of different types of people, and to have leadership opportunities at a young age in the very formative years of my life. And so, I feel like those three things were major contributing factors to realizing I want to live life on my own terms and I want to not be reliant on everyone else if I don’t have to be.

And so, that’s really what’s driving is I don’t want to necessarily need to be relying on everyone else. So driving back to the beginning, I want to be able to build those things in to raising my kids to where those type of concepts are just natural, growing them up, as they grow up.

So as an example, is I want to teach them about chickens. So a couple of years ago, I started learning about chickens and we now own chickens. We’ve done two runs of meat chickens and we now have laying hens. I’ve talked to them about that in the past. But specifically, what I want to do is we’re going to hand this operation over to our kids and it’s going to be their business unit. They’re going to learn how to deal with business. They’re going to learn about profit and loss. They’re going to learn about sales. They’re going to learn about taxes. They’re going to learn about buying inventory. They’re going to learn about dealing with the chickens themselves. They’re going to learn about packaging, marketing, all the things that go into running and operating a business.

But it’s just going to be part of what they do. And so, they’re just going to naturally learn about the entire process of running and operating a business. The other thing that’s going to give them is they’re going to know how to deal with food. They’re going to be able to grow their own food, be it animals or gardens or whatever. That way, if something terrible goes bad in their life, in the future, they at least have a skill to be able to fall back on that A, they can eat and they can survive and they can actually start producing an income from things that they’re doing. If nothing else, they can barter with it.

I don’t ever expect them to get homeless or anything or expect us to become homeless or destitute or any of those things, but they at least will have a skill set that they can fall back on. And I want to drive it home, the importance to them of the confidence that they can have and their ability to be able to do that. Because it’s another thing that I want to instill in them is the confidence to be able to live life the way they want to live life.

And I feel like those things are something that will be very valuable to them in the future, because A, if they decide to start a business, they’ll know how to run it. And B, if they ever go work for someone else and they know the entire scope of running a business, that changes the perspective that they’ll be in whenever they are working for someone else. And it’ll help them become a better employee and understand how to make decisions better.

So those are some of my main motivations for the girls. So and outside of doing the DIY stuff for my kids and being able to teach them and help grow them to be self sufficient, I want to be able to teach other people. I want to be able to teach other people how to do the things that I’m learning. Because there’s one thing that I know for sure is that there’s a lot of people in my situation that they’ve grown up in the suburban lifestyle. My generation, a lot, and they’re starting to break out.

And it’s especially important during economic downturns when you need to learn how to do these things, because you might not have a job, but you still got to fix that roof. You might not have a job, but you got to fix a chair, or you need a chair, or you need a table. You just need to be able to do specific things and you just don’t have the money because you’re out of a job.

And those are the types of things that happen in economic downturns and we’re inevitably going to have one again in the future. And so, I want to learn now and be able to build information and be able to teach other people so that when those times come, there’s less of a problem for them there. There’s less of a problem. Or when they’re ready to learn that right away, they have a place that they can go.

So I want to be able to help people with the things that I’m learning, because I feel like I can bring my perspective of learning how to do this and be able to teach it to other people that are at my same level, or the level that I’m at when I’m teaching something. I feel like I was able to do that in the software world when I taught people how to do programming, is that I took the perspective of how I felt while I was learning and create a content for those situations.

And so, that’s what I’m trying to do now is things that I’m learning now, I want to create content for the people at my level that I’m currently at so that they can get better. Because I don’t want people to go through the headaches and the frustration that I have had to go through. I want to shorten that amount of time for other people than what I had to go through. So that’s another motivating factor.

And really over the weekend, when I realized that I had lost sight of what was motivating me and I remembered what was motivating me, that just totally changed my perspective on getting stuff done. And I was able to just charge forward, full blast again and go for it.

And so, I know this is a little different of an episode than we’ve had in the past, but I wanted to talk about the things that were … I just wanted to talk about having a tough time and to help other people realize that they happen. I mean, I’ve been getting into doing DIY stuff for a little over a year, more than I’ve ever done before, and I’ve learned a lot, but have a long way to go. And it can be very frustrating and demotivating when you’re just working through the process and going through the day-to-day and you lose sight of where you’re trying to go.

So with that, I’m going to go ahead and end the episode here. I’m not going to have a failure segment, because in a sense, I feel like this entire episode has been that because of trying to regain that motivation. But I would like to ask you something. Please feel free to visit the website at B-U-D-D-I-Y.net, find the episode for episode six, and leave a comment about what motivates you and how you’ve regained your motivation. I’d like to spark a conversation around this, and it’d be greatly appreciated if you could leave your comments and we could have a discussion on it.

So with that, I’m going to leave you off here. I thank you for your time and I ask that you have a great day.