100 Ways to Motivate Others : How Great Leaders Can Produce Insane Results Without Driving People Crazy

The reason most major goals are not achieved is that we spend our
time doing second things first.
—Robert J. McKain, Management Consultant
Without creating a vision for my team, my team will
live according to its problems.

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Without goals (the subsets of vision), my team will
just fight fires, work through emotional upsets, and worry
about the dysfunctional behavior of other people. I, my-
self, as their leader, will have attracted a problem-based
existence. Soon, I will only end up doing what I 
feel
like
doing, which will sell me short and draw on the smallest of
my own brain’s resources.
But when we humans begin to 
create
, we use more of
the brain. We rise up to our highest functioning as hu-
mans. So it’s my primary job as a motivator to create a
vision of who we want to be, and then live in that picture
as if it were already happening in this very moment.
And it has to be a vision I can talk about every day. It
can’t be a framed statement on the wall that no one can
relate to after some company retreat is over. It is not sur-
prising that one of the biggest complaints about leaders
that show up on employee surveys is, “He had no idea
where we were headed. He had no vision of our future
that he could tell us about.”
Create a vision. Live the vision.
82. Stop Looking Over
Your Shoulder
Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather the judgment that
something else is more important than fear.
—Ambrose Redmoon, American Philosopher
There’s no one less motivational to be around than some-
one who is always trying to anticipate other people’s criticisms.
Stop Looking Over Your Shoulder

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/ 100 Ways to Motivate Others
The worst trap for you as a leader is to begin antici-
pating what your own leaders think of you from moment
to moment, to do superficial things to impress them, rather
than doing real things to encourage your own people.
Great leadership by example (such a great motivator
of others) comes from getting independently better at what
you do, and not living in anticipation of other people’s
opinion of you.
It allows you to increase your leadership strength ev-
ery day, and to build your self-esteem.
Paradoxically, the more you focus on doing your own
best work and staying in action to fulfill your personal and
professional goals, the more help you are to others.
83. Lead by Selling
Everyone lives by selling something.
—Robert Louis Stevenson
Dan Kennedy is a local marketing expert who has done
a lot of direct sales in his lifetime. He has made the obser-
vation that the most successful doctors, lawyers, teachers,
and businesspeople that he works with invariably have some
sales experience in their background.
Scott recalls: I was wondering, before, why I’ve never
had a problem enrolling people in projects. It’s just been
very easy for me, always. And then I heard Dan Kennedy’s
observation:
You know, he’s right!
Before I had had some
direct sales experience, I was very poor at enrolling people
in projects and ideas. Afterward, I was great. So let me tell
you how I experienced that transformation in my life.

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Before I went to college, I decided to spend a summer
selling books door-to-door in Pennsylvania. I attended a
week-long sales training school put on by a company called
Southwestern, the largest door-to-door book sales com-
pany in the United States. (They primarily use college stu-
dents to work during the summer.)
During this week, we learned our basics. It was the
old-style selling: You learned your sales pitch and memo-
rized it. Then you learned about door approaches, how to
inspire confidences and get in and make your presenta-
tion, and how to close (gracefully asking for the order).
Just classic selling.
The very first house I called on, I actually sold some-
thing. And I thought,