Inspiration vs. Motivation

At the beginning of our business journey, I started listening to a bunch of podcasts on entrepreneurship.

Inspiration and motivation were recurring themes that regularly got lumped together and the often painted picture was: If you wait to be inspired or motivated to get something done, you’ll never accomplish anything.

But Inspiration and motivation are completely different animals.

Inspiration is energy - energy that gets embedded in the things you create.

That energy is a cocktail of the vision you have inside you mixed with the things you experience that move your soul.

If we feel inspired, we can pass that energy on to other people through our work. We can never give more than we have, and if we’re not inspired in our work, it will show. It’s this energy that makes an experience memorable.

This is why our favorite restaurants are places that create memorable experiences while others are simply places to get food. The thing they do is the same, but one is completely uninspired.

Enter motivation. Motivation is inspiration's boring cousin. Motivation is simply the drive to get something done. People seem to love to comment on intrinsic vs. extrinsic motivation - how one is fleeting and the other has staying power. Sure. But at the end of the day, neither is enough if you want to create something worth remembering.

That basic restaurant you go to, the one that’s purely functional and entirely unmemorable, whoever opened that place was just as motivated as the person who opened your favorite restaurant, they just weren’t as inspired or didn’t understand how to channel that inspiration.

The ability to inspire and create memorable experiences has nothing to do with money. A fancy build-out alone is not inspiring, a painting that moves our soul doesn’t do so because of the amount of money that was spent on materials.

This is your true competitive advantage in your business, in your projects, in your life. If you can channel your energy, you have the ability to inspire people in a way that only you can do. Create an experience only you can create.

Let’s go!

Chris Baca