Waves of motivation

I'm an entrepreneur and I often compare my work life with a rollercoaster ride. There are ups and downs. Some days are bad, others a good and some are a bit of both.

The ups can be everything from closing a sale, writing some great code, making a customer happy or solving something tough. The lows are all the things you don't hear about: firing your first employee who just invested his entire saving in you, the upcoming board meetings where you missed all numbers or the big client who just left you.

Startup life is like a sine wave.

But the thing is that real life doesn't look that pretty and stable, it's often chaos.

The ups motivate me and make me forget the downs. That's maybe why I jumped into this crazy life. I thrive as long as the average output of my wave is closer to success than total failure. The average will keep me running, and the positive spikes will make me happy and get me to push for a higher average.

However, it's not only me on the team. Everybody on a team has their own wave. For a salesperson the ups can be closing that sale that gets them to hit index 100, a developer can be fixing a hardcore bug or solving a customers problem.

When we sit ten people around the Legal Monster office we have each our wave, some spikes up, some down, some have a high average, some a bit lover. All our individual waves are connected through our pulse as a team.

My wave is heavily influenced by all others on the team, and that's not because I am the CEO, but all of the great co-workers have also expressed the same thing, someone else's up can bump you towards happiness, no matter how deep you. If sales close an awesome deal that momentum and happiness influence developers too, it's their work getting sold, and the other way around. This results in everybodys lowest point comes closer to the teams avarage level of motivation right now.

This is why celebrating as a team is so extremely crucial for the moral. It will make everybody's average higher and the number of highs greater.