 How to stay motivated working for yourself. Are you feeling down? You kind of don't feel too excited about working today. You thought that you start your own business and you'd wake up and you'd be motivated every day, but it didn't happen that way, did it? In this video, I'm gonna show you how to stay motivated every single day so that you get the best results and we're starting right now. Hey, I'm JR Fisher. Thank you for joining me on this channel. I really appreciate it. If you're new to this channel, please make sure you subscribe below and hit the big button down there. It really helps the channel. I would really appreciate it and only takes you a second. Hit that like button and turn on bell notifications. That's the really important one. Once you subscribe, the bell will pop up. You turn on all notifications. That way you are notified. You are part of the Fisher family, the VIP group that gets notified every single time I do a new video. You want that. Okay, I've sold millions of dollars of both digital and physical products online, been doing so since 2009. So on this channel, it's really your channel. It's not my channel because if it was just me, there'd be no point, right? The point of this channel is to teach you those tips, tricks and techniques so that you can move forward. And in this one, I want to talk about motivation. This is one of the things that I think more and more people have a problem with. We all know that working from home can be great. We don't have that commute. Maybe we can sleep in a little bit longer. You know, there's all kinds of little advantages. Eat lunch at home, save some money. But what happens to motivation? Motivation at home is I think harder to muster up than it is on a job because on a job, you've got people who expect things out of you. When you work for yourself, there's nobody that expects anything out of you. I mean, I could literally get up and watch TV all day and nothing goes wrong, okay? Because we have an income now. That's pretty cool. To get myself motivated, to do more things, to create more. To make this video you're watching right now, I use a few tricks and I want to share them with you in this particular video. Now, the first thing is, I would say get up. Now, you say, well, I get up every day, JR. No, I mean, get up at a decent hour. Don't sleep into nine or 10 o'clock. You're not gonna get as much accomplished. And a job wouldn't allow you to do that. If you're working for yourself and you're sleeping into nine, 10 o'clock, you are actually cheating yourself is what you're doing. Next thing I would say is get ready for your work day. I don't mean you gotta put a dress on or you gotta put a tie on, but you do gotta change clothes. You gotta put on clothes so that you feel like you're up and ready to make things happen. You're cheating yourself if you don't do that. It's easy to sit in your underwear all day long and not shave and not shower and do any of that. Nobody's gonna know, but you will. Psychologically, that has an effect on you. Whether you want to believe that or not, it has a huge effect on you. If you don't go to work every day, whether it's in your office or your couch or wherever you're working, prepared and looking good, then that's gonna have a psychological effect. If you are working on the couch and you go, oh my God, somebody's at the door. I gotta put some clothes on. That's a bad thing, okay? Because you wouldn't do that at a job, so why are you doing that to yourself at home? You're actually cheating yourself and it has a huge psychological effect on you, whether you realize it or not. Next thing I'm gonna tell you is designate a zone for your work. Your work should be done in a place that's comfortable. Now I have a desk set up here in my office, good lighting and all that. I don't work here, okay? I don't work here. I normally work out of a Starbucks before the pandemic, or I would work sitting on the couch, but that was my designated area to work and I knew that I had everything turned off. There's no TV in the background, no radio playing, nothing. I'm there to work and you need to do the same thing. Try the Pomodoro technique. What's the Pomodoro technique? And I'm gonna put a link to a free timer you can use, but the Pomodoro link is you set a set amount of time to work and then you take a break. The next thing that can cause burnout and lack of motivation is, especially when you have your own business, the work never ends. I mean, literally it never ends. And what I mean by that is I can finish one task, but there's always two or three more that need to get started and more that get added to that. So it's just infinity of work, okay? And if you treat it like that, if you go, oh my God, I gotta work from six AM to midnight every single day and you never take breaks, you're just gonna burn yourself out. You can't do that. You wanna use the timer. I'm gonna put it on the screen here. You wanna use that timer and work for 25 minutes and then take a short break. Take a five minute break. Go outside, walk around, walk around your house, call a friend, check some of your personal stuff. The problem is, too many people check their personal stuff for 25 minutes and then work for five minutes. That won't work, okay? So do allow yourself to have that free time, but understand that you need to take breaks. Take advantage of virtual tools and apps. If you're working from home, buy yourself all the time. It can be very isolating. So I also wanna suggest you use things like Zoom or Skype and have a call with a friend every now and then and get together with him and maybe a business friend. I have one tomorrow, as a matter of fact, with a business friend. Been on a lot of trips with him and been to some of his masterminds and I'm gonna sit down and just talk to him about what's going on in his life, what's going on in his business and he'll ask me about mine and we'll just touch base. And that's kind of energizing to see what other people are doing. And it helps him because he works alone. It helps me because I work alone and you're having that interaction. You can use a Skype and see each other and really just kind of catch up. Do that every now and then too. The next one I don't always adhere to, but I'm gonna tell you to do this one. And that's have a strict cutoff time. In other words, don't work until you go to bed and get up as soon as you get up, start work and then go to bed and it's a bad cycle. So you wanna say, hey, I'm gonna quit at six o'clock this evening or I'm gonna quit at eight o'clock or something like that. And I don't have a really strict cutoff time, but I would say after 7.30, eight o'clock, I normally won't work anymore after that time. I'm not saying I haven't or I'm not saying I won't in the future, but for the most part I say that's it. I'm done for the day because I started like 7.30 in the morning, but I worked until 7.30 at night. Then I take some breaks in between there too. Some of my breaks may be a workout, maybe a bike ride, it may be some type of floor exercises or something, but I do take the breaks in there. So I'm not working 12 hours every day, but I've done it when I had a project. I have done that. And I'll probably do it in the future some too. It's not hard work, guys. If you're working online, quit telling yourselves, oh, it's so exhausting, oh, it's so hard. It is not, it is not, okay? Hard is being a roofer in 100 degree weather. That's hard, okay? That's hard work. Pouring cement or pouring a blacktop tar on a street, that's hard work, that's exhausting. Typing and talking, it's not exhausting. It may be a little mentally fatiguing, but you know, you can't be physically exhausted. As a matter of fact, I would suggest that you do some physical activity during the day because you ain't getting any, okay? If you're sitting in your chair and you're typing and talking, your body's gonna deteriorate. You have to exercise. That's one of the biggest things that will keep your mental attitude up. You won't feel like exercising, okay? Don't say, well, I'm not motivated to exercise. I know that. Nobody's motivated to exercise. I guess there's a few crazy people out there. My son is big and working out and he loves doing it. But for the most part, you won't feel like doing it, but you need to do it. You need to do a lot of things you don't feel like, okay? You may not feel like brushing your teeth every day, but you know, it's the right thing to do. So you brush your teeth just like exercise. You gotta do it. The next big thing I'll tell you is to close the door on work. Now, I mean this figuratively and I mean it mentally too. So if you can set up an office where you can literally close your door to the rest of the house, if there are distractions. Now, if there's nobody else in the house and nobody's bothering you, you don't have to shut your door, okay? There's no need for that. But if there's kids out there or the dogs are running around or people are interrupting you, try to shut off from that. Now, the second thing I'm gonna tell you is shut off mentally your work. And what I mean is when you're doing something else, enjoy it. If you're going out to lunch with your significant other or you're at the beach or you're going to a movie when we're allowed to go to movies again, make sure you're not sitting there talking about work, okay? Enjoy that moment. And when you're at work, shut off your personal life, okay? Don't be thinking about the problems with the kids and the dog and the house and what you gotta do outside. If you're working, you should be just working. The problem is people keep shifting their mind back and forth. They're like, I'm at work, but I'm concerned about what I should be doing at home or with the kids or the repair I gotta do in the yard. And then when you're out there in the yard, you're thinking, oh my God, I'm out here fixing this thing in the yard, but I should be in there writing that blog. I should be shooting that video. You can't do it. It's exhausting. That's what's exhausting to you. You need to be vested in the moment, the moment that's going on right now. That's what really counts. I told you I was gonna share a story with you that made me really unmotivated, but it really helped me. When I first started my company and I got going, I'm gonna say I went through all my iterations of different products and I got to survival food and I had made enough money to where I could quit my job and I was selling somebody else's brand of survival food and I got a warehouse and all this was fine. Then all of a sudden they quit delivering the food. They quit. I lost my eBay account. They took money out of my account. They shut down all of my listings on eBay. And I was essentially out of business, okay? That is very devastating, okay? Once you quit your job. So the reason I wanted to share that with you is because at that moment, I had some choices. I could go back to my job and I probably could have gotten a job back there again. Or I could just move forward and try to figure it out. And that's what I'm gonna tell you you need to do. You need to move forward and try to figure it out. And it may seem like it's just totally impossible. What do you do? In my situation, I had a product I was selling. It was selling well, people liked it. I was making money on it and all of a sudden it went away. So what do you do? In my case, I actually came up with a competing product to the one I was selling. And I've been selling that product ever since we started. And it was difficult because I would show up to the office and I really had nothing to do, okay? What do you do all day in this office? And I had rented a small warehouse. I had to literally write down things I could do to grow a business. I had to literally go out and look at other people's businesses and see what they were doing, copy some of their ideas. I had to get my products on other people's websites so that I could get some sales because I didn't have enough traffic to mine. So what I'll tell you is if you're working for yourself you're gonna have these bad, bad things happen. I've had a bunch of them along the way. I could sit here and do a two hour long video on problems we've had in the survival food business. But I won't do that. The point is you're gonna have them. Whereas on a job, if you're working for somebody else if a problem arises and there's a problem with the product or the company or the advertising, it's their problem. It's not yours. You just do your job. If you're sales, you do sales. If you're accounting, you do accounting. And the company has problems. Don't worry about it. The problem with that is you may think you don't have the responsibilities like owning your own company, but you also don't have the security. Years ago, I mean years ago, I guess just during the factory days, people literally could get a job at a company and they could move up through the company and they could be assured that they would have a retirement and their job was secure. That's not the case now. It's not the case. Anybody's job can go away. Anybody's, I don't care who you are, you are expendable. A lot of people say, oh man, they couldn't live without me at my job. You have no idea I'm so important to that company. You're not. I'm gonna tell you, I don't care how good you are. You're not. If things change where your job is not as important or if sales go down and that business goes out of business, you're out. You're done, okay? I had an old man when I was much younger and I was in the automotive business and I was a finance manager and I was really good at it and I was making a lot of money and I was making the company money. And I was telling him one day what a great job I was doing. And he listened and he listened. He was nodding his head. His name was Bill Lewin. And he says, son, let me tell you something. Take your fist and put it in a bucket of water. And when you pull your fist out, as long as it takes for that hole to fill up is how quickly they will fill your job. Don't get cocky. And that kind of stuck with me. I was like, ah, okay, maybe I'm not so great. And I'm not saying you're not great at your job or you're not wonderful or they don't need you or they don't feel loyal to you or any of that. But believe me, it's not secure. Believe me, it's not secure. You are not the type of person, no matter who you are, that they can't replace. Everybody can be replaced. Every single human can be replaced. Don't believe you can't. And everything's temporary. I will tell you that. Don't think that because things are great and you're making money at this company, it's gonna be that way forever. Because it may not. I've seen businesses grow and I've seen businesses fail. And we've all seen that in the past years. It's been very tumultuous in the business environment. So working for yourself is great. You gotta use these things. I'm telling you in this video to stay motivated and to get production and to make things happen, but you can. And the cool thing about it is when you work for yourself, you have things you can do. There's always something you can do to improve the situation. Always something, if you look hard enough, there's always something you can do to improve what you're doing. I'm trying to improve our income base by doing videos on YouTube, okay? I don't have to do videos on YouTube. I could live off my survival food and some other stuff I was doing. But I really wanna do this because I know that's another asset that will bring me money in the future. It's a long-term investment. If you're planning on doing videos or making some money in a couple of months, don't do it. It's not gonna happen. You have to do it for months or maybe even years before you see any return. But once you get it, it's an ongoing asset that's gonna pay you. So that's another cool thing to remember. A lot of the things you're working on as an entrepreneur, you don't see results in a day or a month. When I started selling cell phone cases, I had no idea of me selling food and courses and coaching and doing videos on YouTube. I had no idea. I just along the way came across these things and you will too if you show up and you go to work. I really appreciate you watching this video. Don't forget to subscribe below. Don't forget, ring the bell. Turn on all notifications so that I can let you know each time I do a video or I do a live. That's really, really important that you do that. And put your comments below. What did you think of this video? Did you learn something out of it? Did you get motivated by it? Did you not get motivated? Give me a thumbs up too. I would really appreciate that. Put your questions down there. Even if it's unrelated to this subject, as long as it has to do with selling online, I'll be happy to answer that for you. Thank you so much. And oh yeah, there's a course down there. You can get it. It's a $97 course. You can get it absolutely free if you click the link for a limited time down there. Get that, get Cartra, and I'll see you in the next video.