Momentum > Motivation

On my most recent visit to the gym, I noticed a person working out in flip-flops and jeans. No gym clothes, no fancy one-litre water bottle. Just doing the work. The hardest part isn’t lifting the weights, it’s just getting to the gym. Momentum takes over.

I see the same phenomenon play out again and again. Feeling unmotivated to cook, and considering pulling out my phone to tap on the app with the red swish called DoorDash, I started cutting some bell peppers, and the momentum carried me all the way to a good dinner. Wanting to doomscroll before bed, but instead opening the book and reading one page, and looking up to see it’s 1 a.m. and I’m on page 127.

Even at work. Some teams are just better at getting started. Sure, they usually stumble since they don’t wait for specs to be polished, but they build momentum so quickly that they pull energy from otherwise better-structured projects. People want to work in these teams, even when they loathe the chaos and can see it coming from a mile away. Why? Momentum.

On the flip side, some teams seem to need motivation. They are made promises, time off in lieu, bonuses for hitting a date. They complain more, criticise more and usually do not take initiative to fix anything. Occasionally they get fired up, but run out of steam fast.

I’m not saying work, which is definitely more complex than going to the gym, should be something we just jump into headfirst, ignoring strategy, specs, and planning. Those are crucial, and in most cases critical for success. But if you find yourself trying to motivate your team, or yourself, or are at the receiving end of a motivational speech time and time again—you’re likely not running or part of a truly high-performance team. Motivation is short-lived, and teams built on motivation will be surpassed by teams that have momentum, every single time.

In most cases, motivation precedes momentum, but that’s usually intrinsic motivation. External motivation is helpful in small amounts. But because it’s easier to control, easier to generate and can deliver a sudden burst of thrust—like afterburners on a jet engine—leaders double down on it. They forget that, just like afterburners, it consumes a lot more fuel and can’t be sustained.

Building momentum, the snowball-rolling-down-a-mountain-getting-bigger kind, is hard. That’s why it’s crucial that when we see sparks of momentum, we fan those flames. Yet so many people, so many leaders, can’t seem to manage that. I have seen the following patterns being repeated:

1. Poisoning momentum with extrinsic motivation. Believing that people will go faster if you give them more money, longer titles or promise time off. People already expect these things and they deserve them when they put in a solid effort. Extrinsic motivation should be treated like icing on the cake, if you put a lot of it, your cake is just, well, sugar at that point. It can be used to bring already motivated people over to your side. But not the catalyst.
2. Changing direction without providing ample context. We usually need to provide way more context than we think we need to. Changing direction costs acceleration, a lot of it. Often, leaders think the new direction will be a quicker way. But everything seems easier on the surface and usually takes longer, and you start from zero in terms of momentum. Patience is a hard muscle to build. Sometimes we must pivot, but when we do, it must be greased with a lot of context. Otherwise, momentum doesn’t get transferred to the new direction. 
3. Setting short-term goals too often. Momentum takes time to build. If you keep telling people to start over again and again, you’re wasting energy. Like spinning a flywheel and stopping it after the tenth rotation. We need to stop chasing short-term wins where possible. Ideally, the word "short-term" should be met with a sprint in the other direction.

Some thoughts on building momentum. I don’t have a magic formula, but these are some things I’ve observed:

1. Find your (or your team’s) equivalent of “put the shoes on.” For some teams, it’s a proof of concept. For others, it’s the architecture. Create an environment where momentum is rewarded, and stumbling is celebrated as quick learning.
2. Visualize momentum. Daily demos, early alphas, usage numbers. Anything that makes progress tangible. Personally, a paper calendar with a cross on every day I run a mile works wonders as after the 5th mark, I just can not let the streak break!
3. Set milestones and celebrate them. The journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, but if you don’t celebrate step 10, 100, and 500, they all start to feel the same. These are opportunities, not just to remind us of the progress, but of how we would feel when we reach the final destination. I still suck at this.
4. Avoid unnecessary motivation. This bears repeating. Don’t poison momentum with out of blue incentives like bonuses, time off, or recognition, except outside of predefined milestones. These elements are distractions. Once introduced, people stop working from a place of flow and start working for a reward. Huge asterisk here: this assumes your team is already well compensated and taken care of which is not always the case. At the end of the milestone, the project, reward everyone, including yourself. But don’t dangle the carrot halfway through. If you feel the need to, it likely means something’s gone wrong upstream.

The same applies in our personal lives. There’s a reason why videos of successful people saying inspiring things get so many views, and why so much effort goes into setting up the interviews that capture them. These are all extrinsic motivators, icing on the cake that gives us sugar rush. But I’ve never heard of anyone watching the commencement address delivered by Steve Jobs at Stanford in 2005, getting motivated and then spending the next year building something great. Those clips might feel inspiring in the moment, but they rarely fuel real action.

We are all in search of motivation and do so by looking outside, i.e. looking for extrinsic motivation. And given the proliferation of content and software (gamification of everything!) at our fingertips, we’re finding it harder and harder to look inside, wrestle with the monster that is memetmimeticic desire, and discover hints of what we truly want, what drives us, and then take the first step.

Even this essay, which had been taking shape in my mind for weeks, materialised within a few hours once I opened my text editor and started typing. The writer's block was gone and the fragments that were floating around started to connect into full fledged thoughts. All it took was to write the first sentence, which was literally two words. ‘Momentum > Motivation’.

I’ll leave you with just one piece of concrete advice. Forget about the marathon, just go and put on your running shoes and the rest will take care of itself.