Anticipation

The youtube video that gave me this idea is private now so I thought I would write down what I remember from it.

How do you get a client to buy?

It’s the most basic business question, but answering it gives us insight into how we are motivated. To get things done, we need motivation, so this is quite important.

So, how do you get someone to buy something? Fundamentally, it’s not spamming features and comparing them to competitors or giving discounts, although that might help. The decision to take action comes down to one powerful emotion called anticipation. A customer doesn’t buy something because it’s cheap (although again, it may help), they buy it because they are anticipating their lives being better with it. Anticipation is what evolution has based our desire to act on, because if there is a great reward for an action, we should do it, if not, forget about it!

You buy a vacation to Hawaii because you anticipate it will be fun. A company buys a performance-enhancing product or consulting because the management anticipates an improvement in business. You start an awesome project because you anticipate it will be really cool (not because it is cheap, or it is what everyone else is doing).

On the individual scale, if anticipation is what drives action, that means when we need the motivation to finish a project, anticipation is key. Picturing yourself finishing the project, it finally working, and it becoming a runaway success is ambitious but is a great way to generate motivation. I often ask myself What if? In a positive way when I need motivation to get things done.

Usually getting a little taste of a runaway success in my imagination is enough to start putting one foot in front of the other.

Here is the link to the video