Momentum is not just a law of physics. It’s a law of life. When you have steam, you can find yourself almost unstoppable, moving from project to project as effortlessly as Superman leaps over tall buildings. You can write thousands of words in an hour or give a series of great speeches or run a triathlon. But when you’re standing still, it’s so, sooooo hard to get yourself moving again. That couch, that chair, that bed can become like an anchor to you, a black hole of seemingly inescapable gravity with you at the center.

The first lesson of momentum is easy. It’s what to do when you’ve got it, and like you might guess, the lesson is to keep going! If you keep going you may find yourself gathering even more energy. You could soon be doing the best work of your life, bringing yourself to a level of achievement you didn’t know you could reach. Don’t stop for a rest you don’t need just because everyone else is; don’t stop because you have to leap a hurdle – as hurdlers know, you have to run in order to clear the things. If you run into somebody standing still, give them a push too, and see if it doesn’t echo back and build your own energy while you’re at it. You see, while a smile on someone else’s face is a great motivational tool, it’s the best thing in the world if you know you put it there.

The real challenge is what to do if you’re standing still, if your eyelids are reaching down your face, your butt is sliding you forward into a terrible slouch, your arms are falling slackly at your side and your mind is reading an incessant buzz like radio static on shuffle. I don’t care what you have to do to get out of it, but don’t spend another minute in it. Stand up. Shake your body. I’m not kidding – if you’re like 99% of blog readers, you probably didn’t. Go back a few sentences, read it again, and really do it this time. Done? Good. Feel better? Great.

A great motivator to get out of that rut is personal connection. Realizing that another person is feeding energy from you, and feeding back from them, is a great way to start an energy feedback loop in your psyche that can get you motivated quickly and powerfully. The best part is that, in the beginning, it doesn’t even have to be real, but it very quickly becomes real. You can trick your brains for long enough to get this feedback loop started and ride it right to the top.

A fun exercise to do this involves you and as many other people as you like, but you have to take the initiative to start the loop. Stand up and get everyone’s attention. If you’re in a room full of bored people, this should be easy. Tell them to do exactly as you do, then do something ridiculous. Shake each body part, hokey-pokey style, and say its name in any foreign language (”Cabeza! Cabeza!” “Brazos! Brazos!”) or even in English if that’s what you speak. Keep doing it until everyone is awake and smiling.

The main problem you’ll run into is that “down-ness” really does have an insane amount of gravity. It has so much, in fact, that when you start to move away that buzz and that slouch start to seem like a comfortable, relaxing break you could take, after all the energy you’ve exerted to just get yourself moving again. Don’t be tricked. Don’t fall back into that rut you just worked so hard to get yourself out of. Go back to the first lesson here and let your steam take you wherever it wants. Build it up. Don’t slow down. Share it.

Go through life on full, not on empty.

(photo credit: jpockele and Mareen Fischinger)

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