This is Entrepreneurs the Playbook, where each week I bring you some of the greatest athletes, celebrities, and entrepreneurs to talk about their personal and professional playbook to success.

One of the critical business issues as well as life issues

with all the different interference out there

is incentivizing people, whether they be in your employees, your kids, or people within your community for

charitable purposes or causes, there's a disconnect today of how do we truly inspire, how do we incentivize people to do what we need them, want them, or hope for them to do, to reach their potential, to create outcomes that are even better

than they anticipated.

And so I've come up with a few ways to incentivize people over the years and I think the first one is often

overlooked and it's understanding that the best way to incentivize people is to provide value to them. And in order to provide value to them,

today people make it way more complex than it should be. There's only two ways to provide value to people. Number

one, give them more of what they like, or number two, take away some if not all of what they don't like.

And the greatest incentivizer for people is to know what they like and don't like,

especially as an employer. I find that we just

assume that paying somebody would equate to incentivize somebody. Never more

than today is that not true. We need to understand what people like and don't like in order to provide value to them to give them more of what they like and take away what they don't like.

And you will find if you have those open-minded, open-ended questions

that lead us to a transition statement of, would it help you if if you can't get to a point in a

conversation with your employees or community or children hey would it help you if you haven't been more interested than interesting?

You just can't throw money at your children or your employees and assume that's going to be the end all incentive of what they want.

What they want is more of what they like

and for you to take away more of what they don't like.

And so in order to do that, we have to ask open-ended questions

about the subject matter or topic to figure out what they like and what they don't

...