Momentum

Over the years I've done a lot of thinking about both the strategic and tactical aspects of moving my life and business forward and in the process have read dozens of books and probably thousands of articles on the subject. I have a new twist on this topic based on momentum.

Here’s the deal, let’s say you’re stuck in a situation that you’re not especially thrilled with. It might be job, money, life related or whatever. Most likely the problem isn’t moving too far forward or backwards or enough that you’re not taking very much action on it or all the action that you’re taking isn’t going too far. So you end up in a place where your money is earning you .5% interest, your job is giving you a 5% bonus every year, your body is getting a little crappier and you’re moving forward reaaaaallly slowly. Maybe you aren’t moving forward at all, in fact maybe you’re moving backwards and you’re unhealthier, less employed, less compensated, worth less and less happy than last year. It happens to all of us, don’t take it personally. What I figured in these kinds of situations is that I need momentum. Momentum is different from velocity. With velocity, for example you know that you’re going to get a 3% raise every year and your investments are going to be worth 7% more on average every year. Momentum is what happens when your net disposable income is 2% more next year, 10% the year after then 40%, 100%, 300% and so on exponentially to some ceiling. Momentum in this case is the acceleration of progress or roughly your velocity squared.

How do I get there? Well I don’t know how you are going to get there but I can tell you how I’m getting there. First off if you can’t stomach constant change, risk, perseverance and hard work then go ahead and get some Doritos from your cupboard and head back to to your couch to watch Lost reruns.

There are at least three phases to getting leverage and thus momentum that work for me. Here’s what I know;


Phase I – Stuck in the Swamp

In this phase, you do things over and over the same way with the same results. You’re probably kind of disorganized or marginally organized, demoralized or lightly motivated and mostly stuck in the mud. An example would be your bills and mortgage payments. They come in at random times and you pay them at random times hopefully pretty close to the date where your paycheck or tax refund comes in. You might just be emotionally paralyzed by the accumulation of all the details that you have to deal with.

Phase II – Systems of Velocity and Acceleration

The systems part is straight forward, in this phase you figure out systems to do these things that irritated you and held you back by putting in more effort than necessary one time to figure out properly how to handle things repetitively. You figured out how to arrange your bills, taxes, irritating neighbors, bosses, investments, hobbies, passions. You’ve done it so much that it’s been burnt into your lizard brain stump, the same one that knows how to breathe without thinking. At this point the little stuff that used to be big stuff is getting fired off from what has become brain muscle memory. Bigger stuff is becoming little stuff all the time because you’re making systems and once you’ve done it once its super easy each other time. Acceleration and momentum have begun.

Phase III – Systems of Systems

This part is where it gets really interesting. So you’re firing off systems like they’re popcorn and hopefully you’re delegating the systems to other people and things are moving forward pretty fast. You’re the pioneer, you figure stuff out using perseverance, brains and balls. You systemize it once it’s figured out then replicate, train less motivated people to use your system and reap the rewards and repeat. Cool, now you can create a system for creating systems. You can find people who already built systems or hire people who do nothing but figure out systems. At this point, you’re a system factory and everything you do revolves around sustainable, repeatable systems. This applies to almost anything, diet, health, money, work, hobbies, passions etc. You’ll now understand why the most amazing successful people are SYSTEMATIC but they won’t tell you so because their system is the same one that convinced you that there's a pill to cure your fat ass. It's in their best interest for you to not understand the system. The successful people who aren’t systematic generally specialize in a specific domain where they mastered a single system and when that domain collapses so does their success (Vanilla Ice anyone?).

Phase IV, V, VI – Systems ^{^ 3 +}

I couldn’t exactly tell you much about this phase but this is where VC’s, uber banks, mafias and overlay governments live. I’ll lay it out for you when I get there if they haven't killed me first.