When you go to a Chinese restaurant, do you read the advice from the fortune cookies? I do (unless the words are too small).

Here’s the advice from my last visit:

Recognition is the greatest motivator.

That advice really made me think. When we recognize the strengths and abilities in others, it motivates them to do better . . . to excel. Whether it’s your family members, peers, or employees, it works the same. Building people up makes them try even harder.

I once worked for a boss who thought just the opposite. He believed in tearing people down. He chewed up all of his employees and spit them out like toothpicks. He wasn’t choosy either. He was an equal opportunity chewer. And he chewed in public, so you felt like someone in front of a firing squad with all eyes upon you as you were being chewed apart by the hungry bullets.

It’s not fun to work with a gun pointed at the back of your head. It doesn’t make you do better; instead, it causes you to make more mistakes because you often feel more nervous about making mistakes. Not a fun position to be in.

So recognize the strengths of the people you work with. Compliment them on their work. Be the one who says they’re doing a good job. Don’t overdo it, because there’s nothing worse than praise that appears to be false. Mean what you say. Everyone has strengths.

Recognition is the greatest motivator can also mean recognizing a new idea and being motivated enough to do something about it. How many people have ideas but don’t do anything about it?

Sometimes I collect ideas. Martin says I can’t have any more ideas until I finish the ones I’ve already started.

Seriously, ideas are wonderful, but you have to act on those ideas for them to work for you. It’s like buying a software program and leaving it in the box, yet expecting it to boost your productivity.

Recognition is the greatest motivator can also apply to YOU personally. If someone pats you on the back, don’t you feel wonderful? When you finally break into the top ten results in a search engine and start to get corresponding traffic/business to your site, there’s nothing quite like that feeling, is there?

Recognizing that you’ve succeeded is the greatest motivator to place more pages of content on your Web site to achieve more success stories. If you don’t ever have that feeling, you’ll begin to think that SEO doesn’t work, which is far from the case. But you have to experience the feeling of success first.

Recognition is the greatest motivator can also mean that we recognize our weaknesses, accept them, and get motivated to get help from others. We don’t have to be everything to everyone.

In the SEO industry, for example, we don’t have to be a Web designer, graphics artist, programmer, creativity expert, content writer, usability expert, PPC guru, search engine optimizer, CSS guru, and on and on and on. We can specialize in certain areas and team up with other specialists in other areas. But we first have to recognize that we need those other experts.

Look at it this way. The President of the United States’ job is to surround himself with the country’s top advisors, because he can’t know everything about what’s going on in this country and across the world. (We won’t debate whether he’s doing this or not.) We can learn a lot by following in this “ideal” example.

What else can we learn from “Recognition is the greatest motivator”?

What else can we learn from a fortune cookie?

Robin