My team was very lucky to face and for now overcome the extremely dangerous period of disillusionment.
I found that an analogy of a romantic relationship is extremely explanatory of this trend.
When you first meet a guy/girl/brand you like and you fall for them, you enter the nicest period in your life. Everything feels beautiful. You are flying through each day, feeling accomplished, fulfilled, and just happy. You are telling yourself that "Life is worth living to experience moments like that".
That was my team throughout the spring semester when we just started ecommerce. Work felt beautiful and we were invincible to the sorrows of the world around.
When you are doing new exciting work or feeling new emotions, you get extremely excited and invigorated. Going on the first date, just discovering something, meeting a new person, etc. You get butterflies when you get a message.
No matter how amazing the person is or how exciting the project is, there comes a point when it stops being that exciting. It always happens. As humans, we get adapted to anything really.
This is when we enter the grey deadly period of disillusionment.
At this point, we still do not have a new system set up to keep us going and the old motivators do not work.
No matter how amazing America and Vanderbilt seemed in the beginning, I got used to it eventually. That means I had to get my feeling of excitement from sources other than my sole presence in America.
When you spend enough time together, holding a guy/girl/brand's hand and hugging them doesn't feel that special.
At this point, you start looking for new exciting feelings and motivators, which we did by starting our own individual eCommerce brands.
However, we need to make ourselves excited about "old stuff" because there is a lot more to be done. Like having a baby, we cannot just give it up, and also there are still some interesting adventures with this baby.
What happened is that task completion started slipping away. We all found other better things to do than the work for the brand.
What we want to do here is introduce a systematic solution that will reintroduce a sense of excitement back into ou relationship with a guy/girl/brand/project.
It is important to realize that if the relationship is actually worthwhile and promising, you have just exhausted that initial period. There are still other ones coming up, just as if not more exciting.
My teammates came up with a system of reward-based task completion. Every task is assigned with a prize that we compete for and get if we win. This solution proved to reinvigorate us back into working on our joint brand.
The point here is that being aware of this inevitable trend, you can prepare to be ready to design a solution when it is needed.
In the beginning, you are getting the reward of newness from feeling what it is like to be next to this cool guy/girl/brand/project. When this goes away, we need to think of a way to be rewarded with something else other than newness and the motivation to get that guy/girl/brand/project.
If that person/project is worth loving, you need to find a way to keep your love alive. Coming back to 👉Inspiration Design 101, there is no one out there watching out for whether we love someone or even ourselves. All of this is solely our responsibility.
If we stop loving our brand, it will die. if you do not design a new approach to reinvigorate a relationship with a friend or romantic partner, you will lose a great person.
🗣If you see yourself getting less excited, feeling down and not having the same motivation towards something, it is time to design a new approach for getting rewarded with something other than newness.
