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16 Motivation Killers That Every Entrepreneur Must Deal Strategically

The greatest challenge for today’s entrepreneurs is to figure out the ways to stay motivated. Even the inventive, aggressive, confident, and highly competitive entrepreneurs happen to lose motivation at times.

If you are an entrepreneur and feeling demotivate, it’s very important to immediately figure out your motivation killer and heal the effect.

Knowing the motivation killers won’t just help in gaining your motivation back, but will also be helpful in planning ahead and avoiding certain situations that may drain your energy.

motivation killers

Below is the list of potential motivation killers and a quick fix for each.

16 Motivation Killers That Every Entrepreneur Must Deal Strategically

1- Unhealthy Lifestyle: The most common focus killer among newbies is being unfit. One cannot simply focus on anything if he’s not physically fit.

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How to Cure: Whatever the situation is, your health and fitness must not be compromised. Eat healthy and get on the move for 30 mins/day at least.

2- Working in Isolation: Most of us are more productive when surroundings are peaceful. Being an entrepreneur you have to be jack of all and need to do lot of stuff yourself and for this many prefer working in isolation.

How to Cure: Join relevant communities to discuss ideas, seek help and share experiences. You may also look for co-working spaces or participate in local meetups to stay focused, more energized and learn new things.

3- Being Perfectionist: I am not going to launch this app until it’s perfect! Well, that perfection may come when tens of such apps are already in the market and you end up with a feeling of failure.

How to Cure: Focus on progress rather than perfection. Look for getting things done at first, rather than doing perfect things. There is always room for improvement, which you can bring constantly, but learn moving ahead with limited resources.

4- Overheating Yourself: So, you have to look after all the departments and do the work of ten persons alone! You are working 20 hours/day for so many month. It’s good being super energized, but make sure you are not overheating yourself.

How to Cure: Take some time out on weekly basis to hang out with friends and family and have fun like successful entrepreneurs do.

And yes, there are a lot of stuff that must be outsourced, so do consider software development outsourcing, content marketing outsourcing, hiring a marketing company and even social media outsourcing when this can help you focus more on generating business.

5- Not Believing in Yourself: Everyone makes mistakes, but at times mistakes lead to disbelief on yourself.

How to Cure: Do not let the feeling overcome you and force yourself on things that you can do well. Meet new people, especially who can help you with your ventures as co-founders or business partners.

And yes, you must have a good business advisor too.

6- Inappropriate Advice: No one is 100% and everyone needs advice at any stage, however, not getting the right advice definitely leads to failure and thus de-motivation.

How to Cure: Do not rely on a single advice, rather involve multiple people and evaluate all the advise before taking a final decision. Network with more and more people and never be shy in asking what you need to know.

7- Insufficient Research: When you step into a business model for which you have not conducted a proper research, you encounter a series of issues resulting into a de-motivation.

How to Cure: Conduct market, consumer and competitor research before starting up and make research an essential part of your business process.

8- Multitasking without Setting Priorities: So, you have 100s of tasks and you are at the middle of nowhere! Ultimately you end up mixing things and none of the tasks gets completed.

How to Cure: Focus on important and urgent tasks first. Use the illustration below to sort things out.

how to prioritize tasks

9- Unclear Goals: For goals to be achieved, it’s very important that they are clear to you. When you do not have clear goals, you do not have clear plans.

How to Cure: Make sure to have a proper Business Plan, even if it’s a one page business plan. And yes, do know about aggressive and achievable goals and how to set goals for your startup.

10- Distractions: The noisy workplace, heavy flow of incoming calls, household duties in work hours and so on. You end up not meeting the targets and ultimately get demotivated!

How to Cure: Have a well organized time table and a distraction free work space. For instance, a well defined editorial calendar can save tons of time when you are doing content marketing.

11- Inadequate Encouragement: You need to encourage yourself time to time. Not doing so results as de-motivating yourself.

How to Cure: You should treat yourself exactly like you want others to treat you.

12- Too Much Social Networking: Not all, but most of the newbies find it hard to detach the Facebook and Twitter hangouts. Too much social networking is the common reason for being non-productive and they end up being demotivated.

How to Cure: Mute browser and email notifications and have a time slot specified for social networking. If this really doesn’t help, uninstall the mobile apps. Do check these productivity hacks for entrepreneurs to optimize your performance.

13- Fear of Failure: It’s probably the most common fear leading to entrepreneurial de-motivation.

How to Cure: Read detailed guide on how to deal with fear of failure.

14- Fear of Growth: This de-motivation is most commonly encountered at a stage when the business starts growing.

How to Cure: Read detailed guide on how to deal with the fear of growth.

15- Fear of  Financial Insecurity: Entrepreneurs who start with low or no budget and have no alternative source of income are more prone to this type of de-motivation.

How to Cure: Read detailed guide on how to deal with the fear of financial insecurity.

16- Entrepreneurial Boredom: An idea you were once crazy about is now on your nerves and you just want to get rid of it and do something else.

How to Cure: Check out our guide on how to deal entrepreneurial boredom.


Depending upon your situation, there may be some other motivation killers too. So, the key is to investigate what actually is de-motivating you and avoid it with focus on your goals.

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