You hear the word momentum often in sports. “They have the momentum” or “the momentum has shifted to the other team”. You don’t hear very much about momentum when it comes to our lives.
The Merriam-Webster definition of momentum includes: “the strength or force that allows something to continue or to grow stronger or faster as time passes”. There is this sense of increasing movement over what seems to be a short period of time.
I have found over the years that momentum in our lives is never sudden and many times goes unnoticed. It never occurs by chance or good fortune.
To gain momentum in your life, you have to connect the dots or piece together small things that you have done in the past that are now helpful in moving towards creating your future. Our actions, what we did yesterday and the day before that will impact where we are today.
It’s tough to do things that don’t bring you an immediate payoff. It’s also really rough to be disappointed in where you are today without realizing that you never thought about where you wanted to be on this day one year ago.
All this can change by paying attention to a few things. Build skills in areas that you want to have knowledge in. That you think would be helpful sometime in the future.
For example, if you are thinking about retirement in the next ten years spend time today learning about how to invest your money. Read about how others have planned for their retirement. Where could you invest $1,000 that could bring you more than 1% interest? You may not invest in anything for five years, but you will know a lot more about how people do it.
Most importantly, you need to think about who you want to be, what you want to have, and what you want to accomplish 1, 5, 10, or 20 years from now. This most certainly will change over time. THe important thing in doing this, it will help guide you about things you need to learn about.
Where the momentum in your life gets built, is as you move forward trying new and different things you begin to use a little bit from this new knowledge and a little bit of that new experience. This gets repeated over and over as you build on both of these. Slowly, your effectiveness increases and things begin to happen a little more quickly. You don’t feel like your spinning your wheels as much.
But to get to this point you must do a lot of things that don’t show an immediate payoff. It’s common to hear people say that this person’s overnight success was really 10 years in the making.
Today’s a good day to start building for your tomorrow. You might just become an overnight success in only 7 years instead of 10.
You just have to want to try.