Mastering Momentum: 4 Secret Practices of Elite Performers

Some businesses never get a hold of it.

Most businesses that do, fail to hold onto it for long.

Every business owner would KILL to maintain it.

What is it?

Momentum.

Let’s get Newtonian for just a moment. Broadly, momentum can be defined as the strength or force gained by motion or by a series of events. It’s often used to help define the length of time required to bring a moving body to “rest.”

In layman’s terms, the heavier an object is, and the faster that object is moving, the harder it will be to stop it.

If a ball is placed at one end of a graded surface, and allowed to roll down it, it will continue right on rolling until it hits a plateau and loses velocity.

Okay, out of Newtonian and into the “business world.”

Isn’t this more or less exactly what running a business often feels like? You hit pockets of momentum – a downward grade that allows you to pick up velocity.

Inside of our business we typically say that we “have the wind at our backs.”

Then you hit that first plateau. Sometimes you have just enough momentum to propel you forward and keep you moving until you hit the next leverage point… then you start picking up speed again.

What we’ve found again and again is this:

“When you get out of momentum, it is twice as hard to get back into momentum. And when you’re in momentum, it’s easy to keep momentum.”

So, how do we break the Newtonian “rules” per se, and find a way to maintain our momentum, even when it feels like we’re in a plateau and the wind is not at our backs?

Let’s break down 4 things that successful people religiously do to keep momentum that we should model if we want to do the same!

If you’ve hung around our community for a while you’ve probably heard us talking about the danger of living your life based on first order consequences.

If you haven’t, here is a quick primer.

The first order consequence of any decision is nearly always a “false flag” – and can NOT be trusted. When making decisions, you should always be looking at the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth (etc, etc, etc) order consequences instead.

Example – You start working out 4 times a week:

• First order consequence – Your body hurts and you’re tired
• Second order consequence – Within a week or two, your energy starts to go up
• Third order consequence – Within a month or so, you start losing weight and gaining muscle, giving you more confidence
• Fourth order consequence – Your cardiovascular health begins to improve, prolonging your life
• Fifth order consequence – The increase in energy, drive, and stamina leads to better brain function and increased productivity

As you can see, the first order consequence was a NEGATIVE one. If you made your decision as to whether you were going to continue working out solely on that first order consequence, you’d give up after just a couple of trips to the gym.

However, if you made it based on the second, third, fourth, and beyond, you’d see that continuing past those initial few days would be well worth the initial discomfort.

The same is true for nearly every aspect of both your life and business. Sacrificing comfort now for the assuredness of future success is always a worthwhile trade-off. The most successful business owners on the planet do not mind being uncomfortable. Pursuing a life of ease is perhaps the most certain way to avoid a life of success.

We have an entire article on the danger of “easy living” and the value of risk tolerance. Check that out here.

This sort of goes hand-in-hand with idea number one – but successful people always up the ante.

It’s not enough for them to simply tolerate a little discomfort. They actively go out of their way to find what will cause them the most discomfort, and pour their energy into it.

Jim Rohn, the famed speaker and teacher, used to tell the story of when he first started learning from his mentor, Earl Shoaff.

Shoaff asked him to provide a list of his goals. Since he had never compiled one, he found it to be harder work than he imagined. At the end, as his mentor was reviewing them, he told him, “You should add ‘Become a Millionaire’ to your list.”

At that time, Jim Rohn was practically broke. Not enough money to pay his bills. Creditors knocking on his door and threatening to repossess his belongings. You get the picture. So he asked his mentor why he should include that on his list of goals.

“Because of what it will require you to become in order to achieve it.”

That is why the elite seek out the most uncomfortable situations.

Because they know that achieving greatness will always require more of them than who they currently are, and they want to get to the next version of themselves as quickly as possible.

Failure is good. In fact, failure is often one of the best things that can possibly happen to you.

… IF you’re smart enough to recognize it as such…

Your relationship to failure is perhaps one of the primary determining factors of future success. One of the all-time greats at this was Sir Winston Churchill.

Despite his posthumous reputation as a level-headed world leader during one of the most trying and turbulent periods of modern history, Churchill was neither liked or universally accepted when he came to power in Great Britain.

He had been responsible for what many viewed as one of the most severe blunders in British military history. And his peers and superiors in the government had not forgotten.

However, Churchill had a remarkable ability to turn failure into fuel. To take the experiences and data that can only come from missing the mark (sometimes aggressively), and reframe them as bullet points of future success.

We call this “antifragility” – the property of a system which allows it to grow or thrive, even in the most adverse circumstances.

When you decide that you are going to be elite, that you are going to forgo a life of comfort, that you are going to seek out difficult mountains to climb, that you won’t get suckered in by first order consequences, that you won’t succumb to the pain of failure…

Then your next most important task is ensuring that the environment you have built around yourself supports your decision.

No amount of discipline on planet earth can overcome an incongruent environment (see Dr. Ben Hardy’s excellent book on the topic, “Willpower Doesn’t Work,” if you don’t believe this).

You can argue this all you want, but history proves time and again that your life is not a reflection of your values. It is a reflection of your environment. If the environment you have crafted around yourself is aligned with your mission, you can actually “outsource” your behaviors to that environment.

Let’s use a simple little example for this.

Say you want to start getting up earlier each morning. So you set an alarm on your phone. However, this is not super effective. You can easily just shut the alarm off and go right back to sleep.

Now, say you buy a really loud alarm clock and put it several feet away from you on your dresser instead – meaning that you will now need to physically get up out of your bed to turn it off, dramatically increasing your chances of actually getting up early each day.

That is actually designing the environment to be congruent with you hitting your goals.

Inside of our Peak Productivity training, we teach on the Morning Formula, a version of environmental design in which we teach you how to pre-cognitively align your thoughts, feelings, and desires with a future version of yourself. This practice allows you to spot incongruence in your current environment and fix them quickly so that you’re setting yourself up for future success!