It felt like magic.
30 strangers messaged me on WhatsApp asking about my service🎉
For the first time in my business life, I felt I could actually make it.
And for the first time in my entrepreneurial journey, I realized,
I can actually influence my own results. Directly. Deliberately. Predictably.
And that also reminded me of one of the most important findings in motivation science, one that most leaders forget and most people underestimate.
Researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer analyzed 12,000+ work-day diaries from people across industries. Their conclusion was very simple:
Nothing boosts motivation more reliably than a sense of progress toward meaningful work.
Not passion.
Not speeches.
Not company perks.
Progress!
Even tiny progress.
Adam Grant writes about similar psychological findings in “Give and Take,” referencing studies where nurses and call-center employees were burning out. Their work was repetitive. Emotionally heavy. Often thankless.
Then something shifted.
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Nurses were told stories about patients who recovered.
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Call-center agents, whose job was raising money for student scholarships, got to meet one single student who benefited from those funds.
The result?
Productivity went up. Burnout went down.
But their tasks, the amount of work didn’t change at all!
What changed was that they could finally see that their work mattered.
That’s the power of seeing the right kind of progress.
And that’s exactly what happened to me.
The moment I saw those WhatsApp messages, everything I’d been calling “hard work” suddenly… wasn’t. I was answering those at 8pm at night all buzzing with energy with no caffeine needed.
I didn’t give myself a pep talk. I didn’t change my mindset.
I just saw movement.
And my brain lit up like a Christmas tree: “Give me more!”🎄
Now reflect with me, dear reader.
Think about the goals in your life that feel heavy or emotionally draining.
Is it really the amount of work that exhausts you? Or is it the lack of visible movement?
No feedback.
No signs of life.
No evidence you’re getting anywhere.
It’s rarely the effort that burns us out.
It’s working without the feeling that any of it is adding up.
So if work or life, or your entrepreneurial, fitness, or health journey, feels unbearably heavy, check for this first:
Are you tracking progress?
Are you creating progress?
Or do you need to temporarily shift into something where progress is faster and more obvious while the other thing catches up?
Because, it turns out, you can handle a lot more, if you know it’s taking you somewhere meaningful.
How can you build more visible progress into your days?
PS. To leaders: If you want engagement to rise, show people progress every single day. Your strong end of the year depends on it.
