January 9th, 2024
Momentum is both powerful and dangerous. It's a bit magical when you have it. Everything feels like it's going well, and good things keep happening.
Losing your momentum feels like the reverse, like you are swimming upstream with a weight vest. It feels like a curse.
Fitness and nutrition are like this. When you eat healthily and work out every day consistently, your body becomes more powerful. You can run faster and lift more weight. Your body gains muscle and loses fat, so your confidence goes up, and it refreshes the cycle.
But if you stop exercising, it all falls away. Suddenly, going to the gym feels gruesome. You can't lift as much as you could or run as far, and you look out of shape too. Unfortunately, the cycle works in reverse.
The exact same concept applies to your diet. Eating healthy food is easier the more consistently you do it, but eating junk food is also addictive.
The good news is that when we turn consistency into momentum, it feels uncomfortable to stop. You look forward to going to the gym, and you physically crave a run. Junk food feels less appealing, and you extract immense joy from cooking a healthy meal.
Sadly, life gets in the way. Injuries, work, and personal life prevent us from exercising. A lack of time or space makes eating a quick fast meal more convenient than cooking. Sometimes it's the only option.
Don't think momentum only applies to physical health. Financial momentum is very real. You earn more money, so you can start investing, which grows your money even further. You get access to financial vehicles that present compounding returns. Yet extravagant spending is fun in the moment and easy to make a habit. Career momentum is also familiar to most of us. A rising star will continue to get promoted and receive new job offers, while someone laid off will struggle to find work.
When you have momentum, it's almost impossible to slow down. Things just happen. When you lose momentum, it takes an extreme amount of energy to get going again.
Momentum applies to anything that requires some sort of discomfort and sacrifice for a fulfilling outcome. The flip side of that comfort usually lies in immediate, addictive gratification.
A country can have momentum. Remarkable people build strong economies through their skill and labor. Strong economies create more wealth, and wealth leads to spending—spending on products, property, and services. Companies grow in turn, hiring more people and reducing unemployment. All of this keeps inflation and interest rates low, which ushers more wealth creation into the system. Everybody wins.
America had such momentum for over a decade. It was stopped by the lockdowns and subsequent inflation. We lost our cultural momentum as well. We're making progress, but getting back our momentum takes a lot more time and discomfort than losing it did.
Europe lost its momentum a while ago and effectively banned it through regulation. They start to glorify not having momentum and become offended by those who strive for it. The result is a massive collection of smart and talented people who try to leave. A brain drain is a tragic loss of potential momentum.
Startups are a miniature model of this. When you're growing revenue and building fantastic products, everyone wants in. Investors throw money at you, top talent wants to join you, and customers flood in. But if revenue and the product decline for too long, all of these things abandon you. The company survives only as long as its runway.
The obvious solution to this is to:
- Ruthlessly pursue momentum.
- Do everything you can to keep it.
Gaining momentum takes determination, grit, and discipline. You must figure out what must be done and build it into a consistent habit.
Keeping momentum requires a vigilant and stubborn spirit, neurotic even. Understand that what you are doing is hard. It should be. The challenges are to be expected. It's supposed to be fun, but rewarding.
Remember that momentum is a continuous bell curve. At first, progress will feel slow and painful, then rapid and exciting. The fall happens in reverse.
But what's important to remember is that you can keep that upward trend going much longer and further than you think. Sometimes you'll plateau and level out. Other times you may crash all the way back to the bottom. Whichever happens, your job is to start the curve again and repeat steps 1 and 2 from above.