Good leaders don't need any extra motivation.

“How do you motivate yourself?”

I get asked this question a lot, probably because I appear busy: I run a business school, a VC firm, multiple conferences and a pro-basketball team—oh, and I have five kids!

My answer’s always the same: “I don’t need motivation. If you’re worrying about motivating yourself, it’s already too late.”

The feeling of being motivated is something that should happen naturally. It isn’t something artificial that you can manage from the outside.

The late Hirotaro Higuchi, the CEO who transformed Asahi from an also-ran into Japan’s top beer company in the late 80s, had an interesting take on motivation. He called it “balloon theory.”

“Like gas-filled balloons, people’s natural impulse is to rise,” he explained to me once. “Most companies load people up with all sorts of weights that stop them doing so. As a leader, my job is to get rid of all the junk that holds people down and let them rise.”

In other words, a leader should throw out anything or anyone that depresses people’s natural motivation—silly bureaucratic procedures, nasty, second-rate bosses, whatever.

At GLOBIS, the company I founded, I do my best to apply balloon theory. That’s why I have a couple of simple management principles.

1. No one has to do anything they don’t believe in.
2. No one has to do anything they don’t want.

In my firm there is no coercion, either intellectual or emotional. People only have to do things they buy into wholeheartedly (and wholeheadedly).

It may sound crazy, but after a moment’s thought you’ll see that it’s just plain common sense.

—If you force people to do things they’re reluctant to do, they’ll go about the job half-heartedly. The results will be bad and organizational morale will suffer as a result.

—Forcing people to do things they’re reluctant to do actually gives them an incentive to fail. They want everything to go wrong, because then they can come back with, “See? I told you it wasn’t going to work.”

A smart leader never tells people what to do. A smart leader gets people to do the work they want to do and which naturally motivates them.

These are the right conditions for the “balloons” to rise … and the organization to flourish.

But what about me?

On an individual level, we all want to find the things that motivate and energize us. Trouble is, it’s easier said than done. I’ve certainly had times in my career where I felt apathetic and lost.

The toughest period was probably when I came back to Japan after my MBA in the States. Returning to my old job and doing the same tasks was a big anti-climax. I knew I wanted a change, but it was not easy.

What I did was to try and identify the things that naturally motivated and energized me.

How can you do that?

I suggest that you ask yourself a couple of simple questions.

1. What do I enjoy?
2. What is my mission in life?

My answers were:

1. I enjoy creating value from scratch; taking responsibility and being in control; and making people happy. 
2. My mission is to create an eco-system to develop visionary leaders who create and innovate societies. 

As a result, I set up a business school from scratch in 1992 and a venture capital firm in 1996. I’ve certainly had my share of problems to grapple with over the last 25 years, but it’s never been a chore because I believe in and enjoy what I am doing.

So stop trying to pump up your motivation from the outside in. Instead, look into your heart, identify what you really want to do, and then float up, up and away like a balloon—or maybe like a bubble in a nice cool glass of Asahi beer!