What had been motivated the founders of Airbnb, a successful rental aggregator around the world, for 8 years before they turned the company from a loss-making company to a profitable one?
Joe Gebbia and his friends officially registered the company in 2008 in full confidence that the business they launched would be extremely successful as Joe said “we waited the rocket ship to blast off. The idea to create Airbnb surfaced when he moved to San Francisco bringing an airbed with him. After a while he became unemployed, almost broke, having roommate moved out, and the rent to pay by himself.
But here John suddenly learns that a big design conference will be held in his city, and all the hotels are sold out. Then he got the idea to offer his best friend and roommate Brian Chesky to make some money by turning their place into ‘designers bed and breakfast,’ offering young designers who come to town a place to crash, complete with wireless Internet, a small desk space, sleeping mat, and breakfast each morning. They quickly set up a basic website and called their project Airbed and Breakfast.
However, “the rocket ship didn’t blast off” and their business wasn’t successful at all in the beginning. “No one in their right minds would invest in a service that allows strangers to sleep in people’s homes” – said Joe.
Only 8 years later, in the second half of 2016, Airbnb became a profitable company for the first time. Just think about it, 8 years took them to reach the point when the company began to pay off all their invested time and money.
How did they manage the motivation not to fade?
Joe says that he has always believed that turning fear into fun is the gift of creativity. People were afraid to rent out their homes to strangers, and John and his team racked their brains on how to develop a system that builds trust between those who rent a house and those who rent it. In the early days, Joe was a customer service was taking the calls. And, some of those calls were from frustrated landlords, whose apartments the guests turned into a complete mess. Joe and his team experimented, studied how to build a trust system, where guests would understand that they were responsible for the time spent in a someone’s space, and vice versa and tenants will be confident that they can stay in someone’s house for the night safely.
Eventually, the founders of Airbnb managed to develop such a system and now Joe Gebbia’s net worth is $ 11.6 billion.
So what keeps successful people motivated to continue where they started?
According to my observations, motivation fades, if not completely disappears, when we wait for immediate results. The result can be expressed in monetary units if we are talking about business. The result can be expressed in some desired reaction from a specific person, if we are talking about relationships.
If we are talking about business, then in our head we usually put certain deadlines when we expect income, if there is no income, and we keep investing and investing, naturally the motivation goes away. Again, this happens when the brain is tuned in to a specific result within a time frame. If the brain of, say, a businessman is in essence a researcher, then motivation lasts a long time, because it is not tied to the result, but tied to the process. If you keep constant attention on the process, and observe, for example, if I make this move, what will happen, will it exhaust or will not work? Did not work out. Okay, let’s move on. What if now I try to change the image of my project or target audience, will it work or not? That is, you are experimenting, you are playing. In this case, the motivation will go away only if you try all the options, and you will no longer be interested in continuing to experiment.
One millionaire acquaintance said that you cannot give up, and be sure to keep moving, even if something does not work out, even if it does not bring income, but your intuition tells you “do it, then you need to take it and do it.
How motivation is born and where it comes from.
Many millionaires and billionaires who left very poor families and achieved success on their own admit that their main motivator, in addition to excitement and desire to experiment, is the panic fear of poverty or the fear of being back where they came from. This version of fear really helps them to constantly achieve new heights, heights.
The heroine of my favorite American program “Couple therapy”, where married couples come to a psychotherapist for a session, admitted that her motivation to move is caused by constant fear. She inherited this fear from her mother, who, after moving to the United States from Israel, lost everything, and together with her husband she had to work hard to achieve prosperity.
What we are seeing now on social networks is the envy behind all the races and competitions. People motivate each other with envy. Kindle envy in each other, and move forward. Envy is a breeding ground for motivation. Good or bad, it’s hard to say, you just need to treat this as a given, and look at what actions
