How To Create Momentum and Exponential Growth in Your Life

I hope everyone had a safe and productive week. 

I hope you took at least a little time this week to think about follow-through, building trust in yourself, and forming habits.

I hope that maybe you even took action!

If you haven't yet, remember that every day is a new opportunity to start something new and better yourself. It doesn't have to be at the beginning of a week, the beginning of a month, or the beginning of a new year. Start TODAY!! 

Every time you work on improving yourself it's an improvement for life. I don't do "fad diets" here. I give you methods that will always work, and that need to be incorporated into your lifestyle. Not for a month or two to try and hit a goal real quick.

Again, repeat after me. NOT "fad diets", permanent lifestyle developments.

Follow-Through = Trust In Yourself = Habits = Momentum = Powerful Results

The last part of our equation is momentum. As we stated last week, "Once a habit is formed and executed over time it begins to build momentum". 

Let's back up a bit. When I first graduated college and moved to New York City, I was working at a job that I knew wasn't bringing me purpose and I knew that I had to make some changes. The problem was that I didn't know where to start. The task ahead of me was daunting and overwhelming. 

A friend of mine had passed away in high school, and her mom had kept in contact with me over the years. She sent me a book called The Slight Edge by Jeff Olsen.

This was the book that first introduced me to the power of momentum, and the start of a huge perspective shift in my life.

Momentum is very similar to an exponential curve.

Over time the momentum increases quicker and quicker. All of us understand this concept on some level. We've seen a ball start to roll slowly down a hill and quickly gain speed over time.

A good analogy that The Slight Edge uses is compound interest. If you put a penny a day into a bank account it won't gain much interest at first, you'll just be gaining a pennies worth of value every day.

Over time as you keep adding pennies the interest will start to become greater, adding to the total value in your account. This again increases the return on interest, which increases the value even more, which increases the return on interest to even higher levels, which in turn increases the value even quicker than ever before. This is compound interest.

This is momentum.

These concepts can be used for anything. Not just when rolling a ball down a hill or investing money. 

These concepts can be used for habits. Instead of investing a penny a day, how about investing a habit a day? What happens then?

Jeff Olsen uses the example of reading in this great quote from the book:

“I could tell you that if you would agree to read ten pages of one of these good books every single day, over time, you could not help but accumulate all the knowledge you’d ever need to be as successful as you could ever want to be. Like a penny over time, reading ten pages a day would compound, just like that, and create inside you a ten-million-dollar bank of knowledge. If you kept this up for a year, you would have read 3,650 pages—the equivalent of one or two dozen books of life-transforming material. Would your life have changed? Absolutely. No question.” 

A necessary understanding about momentum is how it begins. If you look back at the exponential growth curve above, you'll see that at first the growth is barely noticeable. If this curve took place over the course of 5 years, you can see how you might not even be able to notice much of a change during year 1 or even year 2. 

By year 3 and 4 you might be suddenly experiencing massive changes that are seemingly coming out of nowhere. However, we now know that these things don't come out of nowhere. 

How quickly momentum builds is dependent upon two things:

1. Time
2. How consistent we are with our habits

The outcome is at the top of that exponential curve: Powerful Results.

Think back to some of the big shifts that have taken place in your life. Times when you've changed as a person, things you're proud of creating. What were the habits(conscious or subconscious) that helped contribute to that momentum? How did momentum get you to that powerful result you achieved?

It's important that we recognize we are already the creators of our own world. Positively and negatively. You have already created so many powerful things and now you know how. Imagine what you could do with this knowledge. ​​

If you'd like to get the book I've attached a link below!

The Slight Edge: Turning Simple Disciplines Into Massive Success

“The truth is, what you do matters. What you do today matters. What you do every day matters. Successful people just do the things that seem to make no difference in the act of doing them and they do them over and over and over until the compound effect kicks in.”

- Jeff Olsen, The Slight Edge