No matter how many times you hear it on podcasts, speeches, most of startup life is grunt work. It's not "we're changing the world" kind of work. Sure it could but on a typical day, it's the boring, repetitive, mildly painful kind that keeps everything from collapsing.
Grunt work is:
Writing one more Jira ticket
Sitting in that one-hour sync where only ten minutes matter
Updating the same Excel sheet because the system still isn’t automated
Waiting for that one vendor who promised dispatch “tomorrow.”
Cleaning up the Figma file that everyone swore they’d name properly
Reviewing the CAD issues for the 14th time
Explaining the same thing to the same team thrice because alignment doesn’t persist
Grunt work is the slow, grinding repetition that makes progress invisible but failure obvious is the actual grunt work.
It’s not sexy, doesn’t visualise or get represented well, and doesn’t feel like 'leadership' in traditional sense. So we reach for the motivational speech.
It happens everywhere:
At all-hands meetings
During quarterly reviews when targets feel impossible
Over Friday beers when you sense burnout creeping in
In 1:1s when someone’s clearly lost interest
Sometimes, even mid-crisis when a product fails or bad review hits, and you try to “rally the troops.”
The intent is good. You want to lift the team. But speeches wear off fast because motivation doesn’t compound, progress does.
Look at games and think of how kids play games.
The same kids we think have no work ethic will wake up at 3 a.m. to defeat the same monsters again and again, just to level up a fictional character. If you’ve ever played an RPG, you know what this means. It means, hours of repetition, killing the same enemies, replaying the same levels what gamers call “grinding.” It’s boring on paper, yet somehow fun and addictive.
In the real world, that’s called grunt work. The difference is that games make the grind meaningful. Players do it because they can see the outcome of that extra +5 strength, the new skill unlocked, the boss they can finally beat. They have a visible sense of progress and a reason to keep going. They’re not told to stay motivated. The system is designed to motivate them. They can see the “why” behind the grind. Each repetitive action feels like a step forward. That’s what makes the loop addictive.
Now imagine a startup where there’s no divide between what you need to do and what you want to do and where every small task feels like levelling up. The irony is that the same people who lose motivation in startups will spend hours doing repetitive, meaningless things while playing games just to level up a fictional character. That's the key most miss.
Startups can do the same where instead of speeches, we build systems that make people see their movement:
Track visible metrics
Ship small and celebrate fast & often
Show how every bug fixed or customer replied to, moves the company forward.
Build dashboards that make invisible progress visible
So stop trying to hype your team and make progress itself the motivation.