The Tuesday Test

The Setup – What We’ve Been Sold

Let me ask you something. How many business books are sitting on your nightstand right now? I’m betting at least two or three. One about finding your purpose, another about building unbreakable habits, maybe a third with “hustle” or “grind” somewhere in the title. I know this because I had the exact same collection gathering dust next to my bed, back when I genuinely believed the problem was something inside me that needed fixing.

Here’s the narrative we’ve all been fed about small business motivation: you either have inspiration or you need discipline. The inspiration camp tells you to discover your why, create that vision board, reconnect with the passion that made you take the leap in the first place. Close your eyes and visualize your dream life. Feel the feelings of success. Let entrepreneurship inspiration guide your decisions. Meanwhile, the motivation camp preaches a different gospel entirely. They want you embracing the grind, building systems, developing that ironclad morning routine, learning to do hard things when you don’t feel like it.

The entire ecosystem of business advice operates within this framework. Scroll through LinkedIn for five minutes and you’ll see it everywhere. Half the posts are about finding your passion and letting it fuel you. The other half are about discipline being superior to motivation. It’s presented as a binary choice, and everyone’s absolutely certain their side has the answer.

What strikes me now, after running my own business for the better part of a decade, is how both camps are selling the same fundamental assumption: that your feelings matter more than they actually do. That you need to achieve a certain emotional state before you can do the work. That the right business owner mindset is something you have to cultivate, nurture, and maintain through conscious effort.

But what if I told you that entire conversation is beside the point? That the real operating system of small business runs on something else entirely, something that none of these gurus can package into a course because it’s too simple and too uncomfortable to monetize? What if the businesses that survive aren’t run by the most inspired or most motivated people, but by the ones who figured out something else entirely?

I’ve spent years watching my own patterns and talking to other small business owners who’ve been willing to be honest about their experience. The pattern that emerges is nothing like what the business books describe. It’s messier, less inspiring, and infinitely more practical. Most days, you’re not running on inspiration or motivation at all. You’re running on something else, something that doesn’t have a sexy name or a framework you can teach in a weekend workshop. And once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

 

The Definitions (And Why They Matter Less Than You Think)

Before we go further, let’s get clear on what we’re actually talking about. Inspiration—real entrepreneurship inspiration—is that spark that makes everything suddenly make sense. It’s the moment when you see the possibility of something that doesn’t exist yet. Your brain lights up, your heart rate increases, and suddenly you’re sketching ideas on napkins at midnight because you can’t not think about it. Inspiration is the vision, the “what if,” the glimpse of potential that made you think starting a business was a good idea in the first place.

Small business motivation, on the other hand, is what’s supposed to keep you going when that initial spark fades. It’s the discipline to show up on days when the work feels meaningless. It’s the systems you build so that the business functions regardless of how you feel about it. Motivation is meant to be the steady, reliable fuel that carries you through the uninspired stretches. It’s less exciting than inspiration, more methodical, but it’s supposedly what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the ones who give up.

Both of these concepts sound reasonable when you’re reading about them. They sound actionable. If you’re not feeling inspired, you can do exercises to reconnect with your vision. If you’re struggling with motivation, you can build better habits and systems. The business owner mindset, according to conventional wisdom, is about mastering the dance between these two forces.

But here’s what I’ve noticed after years of actually running a small business rather than reading about running one: neither of these concepts show up very often in the day-to-day reality of keeping a business alive. They’re both abstractions that sound meaningful in theory but dissolve pretty quickly when you’re in the middle of an actual Tuesday afternoon.

Think about the last time your business had a genuine crisis. A key employee quit without notice, or a major client pulled out, or you discovered an accounting error that threw your entire cash flow projection into chaos. In that moment, were you inspired? Were you motivated? Or were you just dealing with it because it needed to be dealt with?

The question worth asking is whether inspiration and motivation are actually the engines we think they are, or whether they’re just pleasant passengers that occasionally show up for the ride. And if they’re not the engines, what is? This isn’t an academic question. Understanding what actually drives your business forward changes how you make decisions, how you structure your time, and how you judge whether you’re doing this right.

I’m not saying inspiration and motivation don’t exist or don’t matter. I’m saying they might not matter in the way we’ve been told they matter. They might not be the prerequisites we think they are. And recognizing this might actually free you up to run your business more effectively than any vision board ever could.

 

The Tuesday Test

It’s 2:47 on a Tuesday afternoon. Not a Monday when you’re still riding the optimism of the weekend. Not a Friday when you can see the finish line. Just a regular, unremarkable Tuesday. Your supplier just called to tell you they sent the wrong product and the correct one won’t arrive for another week, which means you’re about to disappoint three customers who were promised delivery by Thursday. There’s a one-star review from someone who’s mad about something that wasn’t even your fault, but you’re the one who has to respond to it. Your bookkeeper just gave notice, and you realize you have no idea if you’ve been handling your quarterly taxes correctly for the past six months. Oh, and the toilet in the customer bathroom is clogged, and the plumber wants three hundred dollars for an emergency call you definitely don’t have room for in this month’s budget.

Let me ask you directly: in this moment, are you feeling inspired? Is entrepreneurship inspiration flooding through your veins as you contemplate your vision board? Are you motivated, drawing on your carefully cultivated morning routine and your discipline practices? Or are you just moving from one problem to the next because they’re problems that won’t solve themselves?

This is what I call the Tuesday Test, and it’s the most honest assessment of how small businesses actually function. The Tuesday Test asks a simple question: what keeps you working when there’s nothing particularly inspiring or motivating about the work itself? What makes you fix the problem when fixing it doesn’t feel meaningful or aligned with your purpose or connected to any larger vision?

Here’s what I’ve learned from my own Tuesday afternoons, and from talking to dozens of other small business owners who’ve been honest about theirs: you fix the problems because the consequences of not fixing them are immediate and real. You respond to the bad review because ignoring it will cost you future customers. You figure out the supplier issue because you gave your word to people who trusted you. You deal with the bookkeeper situation because payroll is due and it won’t process itself.

This isn’t inspiration. It’s not even motivation in the way the business books describe it. It’s something more fundamental and less romantic. It’s obligation. It’s cause and effect. It’s the simple reality that you’re the one responsible, and if you don’t handle it, it doesn’t get handled.

The Tuesday Test reveals something uncomfortable about the conventional wisdom around small business motivation and entrepreneurship inspiration: most of the actual work of running a business happens in a state of complete emotional neutrality. You’re not pumped up. You’re not dragging yourself through it. You’re just doing what’s in front of you because it’s in front of you.

Think about your own experience for a moment. How many of the tasks you completed last week were done because you felt inspired about them? How many were done because you’d successfully motivated yourself to do them? And how many were just done because they needed doing and you were the person responsible for doing them? If you’re honest about the percentages, you might be surprised.

This matters because we spend enormous energy trying to generate feelings that aren’t actually necessary for the work. We beat ourselves up for not being inspired enough or motivated enough, when the reality is that most successful business owners are just people who show up and do what needs doing, regardless of how they feel about it in any given moment.

 

“Never limit yourself because of others’ limited imagination;
never limit others because of your own limited imagination”
—Mae Jemison, American engineer

 

Inspiration is a Luxury Product

Here’s a truth that the inspiration merchants don’t want you to hear: inspiration is what you get to think about when everything else is already handled. It’s a luxury good, like organic produce or a Peloton subscription. It’s wonderful when you can afford it, but it’s not what keeps the lights on.

When I first started my business, I had inspiration coming out of my ears. I could spend hours thinking about the big vision, the impact I wanted to make, the community I wanted to build. I had a beautiful journal where I’d write morning pages about my purpose and alignment. I felt so deeply connected to my why. And you know what? I was also three months behind on rent and eating ramen for dinner because I couldn’t afford groceries and still pay my business expenses.

The inspiration didn’t help me figure out how to generate revenue. It didn’t teach me to read a profit and loss statement or negotiate with vendors or have difficult conversations with clients who weren’t paying on time. All that beautiful entrepreneurship inspiration actually made things worse in some ways, because I was spending time on feeling inspired instead of learning the mechanics of making money.

You can’t sit at the inspiration buffet when you’re starving. You can’t build a vision board when you’re trying to decide which vendor to pay first so they don’t cut you off. You can’t journal about your purpose when you’re lying awake at night doing math in your head, trying to figure out if you can make payroll.

This isn’t to say inspiration doesn’t matter. But when does it matter? It matters when you have the breathing room to lift your head up and look around. It matters when the immediate crises are handled and you have the mental space to think about direction and growth. It matters when the business is stable enough that you can actually act on inspired ideas without risking everything.

Think about the established businesses you admire. The ones that seem to be operating from a clear vision and making inspired decisions about where they’re going next. Do you think they started there? Or do you think they spent their first few years just trying to survive, and the inspiration came later, once they could afford it?

I’ve noticed something interesting in conversations with business owners who’ve been at it for a while. The ones who are five or ten years in talk about inspiration very differently than the ones who are in year one or two. The established owners treat inspiration as a nice bonus, something that occasionally helps them see new opportunities. The newer owners talk about it like it’s oxygen, something they desperately need but can’t seem to find enough of.

The shift happens when you realize that waiting for inspiration before taking action is a stalling tactic. It feels productive because you’re thinking deeply about your business, but it’s often just a sophisticated form of procrastination. The actual business-building happens when you do the work without waiting for it to feel inspired.

 

Motivation is For Employees

Let’s talk about small business motivation, and specifically, who actually needs it. I’ve come to believe that motivation is primarily a tool for convincing people to work on something that isn’t directly theirs. It’s what managers use to get employees engaged with company goals. It’s what coaches use to get athletes to push through discomfort for team success. Motivation is the bridge between someone else’s objective and your personal effort.

But when you own the business, when it’s your name on the lease and your credit score on the line, what exactly do you need to be motivated to do? Do you need motivation to prevent your own business from failing? Do you need someone to convince you that it’s in your best interest to solve your own problems?

Think about it this way: do you need motivation to pull your hand off a hot stove? Do you need to have cultivated the right mindset to move out of the way of an oncoming car? Of course not. The consequence is immediate and personal, and your response is automatic. Motivation as a concept only becomes relevant when there’s a gap between the action and the consequence, when you’re trying to do something whose benefits are distant or abstract or belong to someone else.

This is why all the advice about small business motivation often feels hollow when you’re actually running the business. The advice is usually imported from corporate contexts where motivation is genuinely necessary—because employees need reasons to care about outcomes that don’t directly affect their survival. But you’re not an employee of your own business. You’re the owner. The outcomes directly affect everything.

I’m not saying business owners never struggle to do things. Of course we do. But the struggle isn’t usually about needing to be motivated. It’s about capacity, about overwhelm, about not knowing how to do something or being afraid we’ll do it wrong. It’s about being exhausted or burned out or scared. Those are all real problems, but they’re not motivation problems. They’re not solved by better habits or more discipline.

When I find myself avoiding a task in my business, the question isn’t “how do I get motivated to do this?” The question is “why am I avoiding this?” Usually the answer is that I don’t know how to do it, or I’m afraid of the outcome, or I’m already at capacity and this is one thing too many. Those require different solutions than motivation.

Here’s a question worth considering: when was the last time you actually had a motivation problem versus some other kind of problem that you labeled as motivation? Were you really lacking the drive to do the work, or were you lacking the knowledge, the time, the energy, or the emotional bandwidth? Reframing the problem often reveals that what you need isn’t motivation—it’s help, or rest, or information, or permission to do things differently.

What’s the alternative to viewing everything through the lens of motivation? It’s simpler and less marketable: you do the thing because it needs doing, and you’re the one responsible for doing it. Some days that feels easy. Some days it feels hard. But whether it feels easy or hard has almost nothing to do with how motivated you are, and everything to do with what else is happening in your life and business.

 

The Real Engine – Consequence

So if it’s not inspiration and it’s not motivation, what actually keeps small businesses running? The answer is almost disappointingly simple: consequence. Direct, immediate, personal consequence. If I don’t do this specific thing, this specific outcome happens, and I’m the one who lives with it.

This is the actual engine of small business. Not the sexy, marketable version that can be turned into a course, but the unglamorous truth that most of us don’t talk about because it doesn’t sound aspirational. Small business motivation in its truest form isn’t about being motivated at all—it’s about being accountable to reality.

If I don’t respond to that customer email, I lose the customer. If I don’t fix this problem, it gets worse and more expensive to fix later. If I don’t submit this proposal by the deadline, someone else gets the contract. If I don’t process payroll, my employees don’t get paid and they’ll rightfully quit. These are facts, not feelings. They exist completely independently of whether I feel inspired about them or motivated to handle them.

What’s interesting is how clean this makes decision-making once you accept it. You’re not asking yourself “do I feel like doing this?” or “does this align with my vision?” or “am I motivated enough to tackle this?” You’re just looking at the reality: this needs doing, and I’m the one who does it. The decision is already made. All that’s left is the execution.

I realize this sounds almost mechanical, maybe even a little bleak. Where’s the passion? Where’s the purpose? Where’s the fulfillment that’s supposed to come from entrepreneurship? Here’s what I’ve found: those things exist, but they exist in parallel to the work, not as prerequisites for it. You can feel passionate about your business and still spend Tuesday afternoon unclogging a toilet. You can have deep purpose and still need to follow up on unpaid invoices. The consequence-driven work and the meaningful work aren’t different categories. They’re the same work, just described from different angles.

The business owner mindset that serves you best is one that can hold both truths simultaneously. Yes, there are larger reasons why you do this work. And also, right now, in this moment, you’re doing it because it needs doing and you’re responsible for it. The consequence is the thing. Everything else is decoration.

Think about the decisions you’ve made in the past week in your business. How many of them were really choices in the traditional sense, where you weighed options and selected one? And how many were just responses to obvious consequences that needed managing? When the invoice is overdue, you follow up. When the customer has a problem, you solve it. When the deadline is approaching, you deliver. These aren’t decisions that require inspiration or motivation. They’re just responses to reality.

This is actually freeing once you stop fighting it. You can let go of the exhausting work of trying to feel the right way about everything. You can just look at what needs doing and do it, trusting that the meaning and purpose and passion will show up when they show up, and won’t when they won’t, and either way the business keeps running.

 

“It ain’t about how hard you hit.
It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.”
—Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa

 

What Actually Happens (The No-Rules Reality)

Now we get to the part that nobody wants to admit because it can’t be systematized or taught or turned into a framework. The reality of running a small business is that there are no rules. Not the inspiring kind of “no rules, anything is possible!” that you see in motivational posts, but the uncomfortable kind where you realize that every single day is a completely fresh situation that you’re making up as you go.

Some days you wake up genuinely inspired. Your brain is full of ideas, you can see the next phase of growth clearly, you’re excited to dive in. Great. Those are good days. Use that energy. Let it carry you as far as it will. But don’t mistake it for the normal operating condition. It’s a gift when it shows up, not a requirement for showing up.

Other days you wake up with what the discipline people would recognize as motivation. You’re not particularly excited, but you’re steady. You know what needs doing and you have the capacity to do it. You work through your task list methodically. These days feel productive in a quiet way. Nothing spectacular happens, but everything that needs to happen does happen.

And then there are the majority of days—the ones that don’t fit neatly into either category. You wake up feeling nothing in particular about your business. You’re not inspired. You’re not unmotivated exactly, but you wouldn’t describe yourself as motivated either. You’re just… here. And the work is there. So you do it. You answer emails because there are emails. You handle problems because there are problems. You make decisions because decisions need making.

 

 

Some days the work you produce is excellent. Some days it’s adequate. Some days it’s honestly pretty bad and you’ll have to redo it later. Some days you don’t do certain things at all, and the world continues spinning. The variation is enormous, and it has surprisingly little correlation with how inspired or motivated you felt.

This is the actual operating system of small business, and it’s nothing like what the business books describe. There’s no consistent state you need to achieve. There’s no perfect business owner mindset you need to maintain. You use whatever’s available on any given day and you do what needs doing with whatever capacity you have. That’s it. That’s the whole system.

The freedom in this realization is immense. You can stop trying to feel a certain way before you work. You can stop judging yourself for not being motivated enough or inspired enough. You can just look at Tuesday and ask: what needs doing? And then you can do it, regardless of how you feel about it.

I’ve had days where I felt completely uninspired and unmotivated and still did some of my best work. I’ve had days where I felt incredibly inspired and produced absolute garbage. The correlation between emotional state and output quality is much weaker than we’ve been led to believe. Sometimes feeling neutral is actually ideal because you’re not getting in your own way with big emotions about the work. You’re just doing it.

Here’s something I’ve noticed: the business owners who seem to struggle most are often the ones who are trying hardest to feel the right way about their work. They’re constantly checking in with themselves—am I inspired? Am I motivated? Do I have the right energy? Is this aligned? Meanwhile, the ones who seem to be doing fine are often just doing whatever’s next on the list without much internal drama about it.

What would it mean for you to give yourself permission to just work without the emotional prerequisites? To open your laptop and do the next thing without first assessing whether you’re inspired or motivated enough to do it? It might mean getting more done. It might mean enjoying the work more because you’re not carrying all that extra weight of self-judgment about how you should be feeling.

 

The Real Insight (Stop Waiting)

After everything I’ve learned about small business motivation and entrepreneurship inspiration, here’s the one insight that actually changed how I operate: waiting to feel the right way before taking action kills more businesses than almost anything else. Not immediately, not dramatically, but slowly and certainly, like a leak you don’t notice until the foundation is rotted through.

We wait to feel inspired before we start the new project. We wait to feel motivated before we make the sales calls we’ve been avoiding. We wait for clarity, for certainty, for confidence, for alignment, for the right energy, for the stars to align. We wait for the business owner mindset we think we’re supposed to have before we’ll let ourselves do the work that’s in front of us right now.

I’ve done this. I’ve watched myself do it in real-time, fully aware of what I was doing, and still unable to stop. “I’ll start that marketing campaign when I feel more inspired about it.” “I’ll have that difficult conversation with my business partner when I feel less emotional.” “I’ll make those calls when I feel more confident.” Every one of those sentences is me waiting for a feeling to arrive before I’ll take the action.

But here’s the question worth sitting with: what if the feeling never comes? What if you wait and wait and you never feel inspired about doing your bookkeeping? What if you never feel motivated to update your website? What if confidence about your pricing never materializes? Do you just not do those things? Do you let your business slowly fall apart while you wait for the emotional prerequisites to show up?

The businesses that survive aren’t run by people who figured out how to feel inspired and motivated all the time. They’re run by people who figured out that you can send the invoice while feeling completely neutral about it. You can fix the problem while uninspired. You can make the difficult decision while unmotivated. You can build the business while ambivalent.

Your emotional state and your ability to take action are two separate things, and the moment you disconnect them, everything becomes simpler. Not easier, necessarily, but simpler. You stop asking “do I feel like doing this?” and start asking “does this need to be done?” The first question has an endless number of possible answers that can change by the hour. The second question usually has a pretty straightforward yes or no.

This is the business owner mindset that actually matters: the willingness to do the work without waiting for permission from your feelings. Not because feelings don’t matter—they do—but because the work doesn’t actually require your emotional endorsement to get done. It just requires your hands on the keyboard, your voice on the phone, your presence in the decision.

I’m not talking about toxic positivity or pretending everything’s fine when it’s not. I’m not talking about ignoring burnout or pushing through when you genuinely need rest. I’m talking about the ordinary, everyday tasks that you avoid because you don’t feel the right way about them, even though you have the capacity to do them.

Think about the last thing you procrastinated on in your business. Was it because you genuinely didn’t have time or energy? Or was it because you were waiting to feel more inspired about it, more motivated for it, more confident in it? And while you were waiting, how much mental energy did you spend thinking about it, worrying about it, feeling guilty about not doing it? Probably more energy than it would have taken to just do it.

What would change in your business if you gave yourself permission to do things while feeling uncertain, uninspired, unmotivated, and ambivalent? What would become possible if you stopped requiring an emotional green light before taking action?

 

Stop Asking Whether You’re Inspired or Motivated

So where does this leave us? If small business motivation isn’t really about motivation, and entrepreneurship inspiration isn’t required for most of the work, what should you be focusing on instead?

The answer is so simple it sounds almost stupid: just focus on what needs to be done. Not what you wish needed to be done, not what you think should need to be done if you were a better business owner with a better mindset, but what actually needs to be done in physical reality. That email that needs a response. That decision that needs to be made. That conversation that needs to happen. That task that’s been on your list for three weeks.

Stop asking yourself “am I inspired enough to do this?” Stop asking “am I motivated enough for this?” Start asking “does this need to be done?” If the answer is yes, then that’s your answer. You’ve got all the information you need. Whether you feel inspired about it or motivated toward it or excited for it or neutral about it is interesting information about your current emotional state, but it’s not actually relevant to the question of whether you should do it.

This isn’t about forcing yourself to work when you’re burned out. It’s not about ignoring your needs or pushing through at all costs. If you genuinely don’t have the capacity to do something right now, that’s real information. But “I don’t feel like it” and “I don’t have capacity for it” are different statements. One is a feeling, temporary and changeable. The other is a fact about your current resources.

The businesses I’ve seen succeed—including my own in its better moments—are the ones where the owners stopped waiting for their feelings to catch up to their responsibilities. They do inspired work when inspiration shows up, because why wouldn’t you? They use motivation when it’s there because it makes things easier. But they don’t stop working when those things aren’t there, because the work isn’t conditional on them.

Here’s what that looks like practically: You wake up on Wednesday morning. You feel nothing in particular about your business. You open your laptop anyway. You look at what needs doing. You do some of it. You do it adequately, not brilliantly. You close your laptop at the end of the day. Tomorrow you’ll do it again. This is what it actually looks like to run a small business. Not every day, but most days.

The secret that can’t be sold is that there is no secret. The work is the work. Some days it feels meaningful and other days it feels mundane and most days it feels like nothing much at all. The business owner mindset isn’t something you build through morning routines and vision boards and motivational podcasts—though if those things help you, great. It’s something you demonstrate by doing the work that needs doing, in whatever emotional state you happen to find yourself in when it needs doing.

Stop waiting for small business motivation to strike. Stop trying to manufacture entrepreneurship inspiration. Just look at Tuesday—ordinary, unremarkable Tuesday—and ask yourself: what needs doing today? Then do that. That’s the whole thing. That’s everything they can’t charge you nine hundred ninety-seven dollars to learn.

Because if the answer really is “just do the work regardless of how you feel about it,” nobody can build a course empire on that information. It’s too simple. Too unsexy. Too honest about what it actually takes to keep a business running.

But you and I both know it’s true. You’ve already been doing it this way, probably for longer than you realize. You just thought you were supposed to be doing it differently. You thought you were supposed to be more inspired, more motivated, more something. You’re not. You’re supposed to be doing exactly what you’ve been doing: showing up, doing what needs doing, and continuing to show up the next day.

That’s the real test. Not the inspiration test or the motivation test, but the Tuesday test. And if you’re reading this, you’ve probably been passing it all along.