Why Are You An Inventor?

The motivation of why you do what you do can have a big impact on the outcome of what you do.

“People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it” – Simon Sinek

As we go through our life as an inventor, if we’re honest with ourselves every once and a while we need to stop and ask ourselves what our motivation is. In other words, if I stopped you right now and asked why you were pursuing your current invention, project or business opportunity, you might give me any of a number of answers. Many inventors may blurt out, “to make money”, or the popular “I want to make a million dollars”. But this being the primary focus of why you want to be an inventor can be a big mistake for a number of reasons.

Now don’t misunderstand me, I’m not one of those who have jumped on the bandwagon of thinking that making money is evil. On the contrary, I believe that there is both a great dignity and morality to business when it is done with integrity. In his book Thou Shall Prosper, Rabbi Daniel Lapin says that making a living is much harder if, deep down, you suspect it to be morally reprehensible activity. I firmly believe that the ability to make money is an important tool that provides for yourself, your family, and additionally gives you the opportunity to give and help others. And while making money is important for the aforementioned reasons, alone it is just not enough reason to keep you motivated enough in order to truly win at inventing. There has to also be the reason that it is something that you love doing, something you truly have found a passion for, and/or a vehicle to help others in some way. This passion will give you the fight and fire on those tough days and give you that reason to fight on another day.

Many people make the “money only” mistake when choosing any career, whether it involves inventing or not. Seth Godin said it best, “Instead of wondering when your next vacation is, you should set up a life you don’t need to escape from.” Business, and particularly the business of inventing, is way too hard to work at just for the reward of money. You won’t work at it and keep that high energy level that is sometimes required to get to the desired payoff if the payoff is only money, because working only for the money ends up being an empty goal. No matter how much money you could make, the work becomes a prison cell if it has no meaning. A good example of this is observing certain people in a business where you are the customer. You can’t miss this comparison, and see it in almost any industry. The first “employee” we see is just there for the money, and you can see it on their face, their body language and in their actions. You can almost smell it on them. The second example is not what you’d want to call an employee but would think of more as a member of team. They believe that they’re there for a reason, believe in what they are doing and it also shows on their face, body language, and in how they perform, which usually results in a great experience for the customer. Both of these people are being paid the same amount of money to perform the same tasks. The difference is the WHY of what they’re doing. And that is the same difference that can make or break a successful invention, business venture or both.

The WHY of inventing is also truly a balancing act, and I’ve personally seen failures caused by extremes on both ends. On the one hand, if you are only inventing for the love of tinkering and coming up with new ideas, that is great, unless you have an expectation of making money at it without doing the things necessary that cause money to be made with an invention. On the other, if you’re focusing only on the money without any of the passion or fire of the “why”, you will most likely fizzle out when the going gets tough. The trick is to have both, tempered with wisdom, to truly win at inventing and/or business.