I created a report about this subject a while ago, and have gotten lots of great feedback. In case you haven’t picked it up, I want to reproduce it here because I truly believe that if you follow this plan, you cannot fail, regardless of your definition of success happens to be.
And since we’re near a new year, and many of you are making resolutions for 2011, this will be a perfect strategy to keep in mind.
So here goes (and please leave a comment when you’re done reading, or at least click on the “like” button at the end if you did in fact like it.
Momentum is something difficult to achieve for many. The good news is, once you have it, you have it.
Sir Isaac Newton stated the law well many years ago (even before I was born 
), that a body at rest, or in motion, tends to remain in that state unless acted upon by an outside force. He said it a bit differently, but that’s the essence.
Now, to avoid argument, that might lead some to think that there would be such a thing as perpetual motion. Not true, there are always outside forces to slow down motion, such as gravity, wind friction, and other factors. I’m not a scientist or physicist, so I won’t get involved in that discussion.
Newton’s “law” though was meant to apply to mechanical devices. What I want to talk about today is momentum as it applies to the mind.
The good news is, mental momentum can indeed be perpetual, so you have that to look forward to if you’re still striving for it to get started.
I remember, and have often talked about, the fact that when I was starting in Internet marketing, I was making absolutely no headway. I tried everything! Everything that on the surface should have worked, if you listened to the successful IM’ers or “gurus”.
I had no momentum. My progress remained at rest, in accordance with Newton’s law.
But then, due to a unique and exciting strategy that I lucked upon, my momentum started up. I started making a little money each day, then a little more, then a little more.
At first it wasn’t big bucks, but it was building. Unfortunately there was always a “glass ceiling” that I couldn’t break through. The first one was at $100 per day.
I remember vividly the first day I made $100 profit from my IM endeavors. I was so proud. I brought my wife over to my computer, pulled up my stats, and said “See, this is what I’ve been working so many years doing, so many hours, for, a $100 day.”).
She must have thought I was nuts, but the sheer excitement and relief that it was possible had me in tears, I was so emotionally taken by the event.
That was the start. Momentum increased, and the next glass ceiling was $200 in a day. It didn’t take nearly as long as the first $100 day, but it was just as exciting because I had always had that goal in mind, as mentioned in my eBook, “5 Bucks a Day”.
More momentum, eventually another glass ceiling at $500 was broken, then one at $1000, and it’s gotten better from there.
But here’s the point. I mentor a lot of IM’ers through my Insiders Club at Earn1KaDay. I see it so often that someone can’t get going. They’re so frustrated, often on the verge of quitting, giving up hope, and sometimes they do give up hope.
Some people reach momentum stage quicker than others. We recently had a very interesting and mentally exhilarating discussion in the forum, and one of the best posts in that thread came from Steve Warwick, a man who’s been a member for years, and someone who’s successful in his own businesses.
Steve posted this which is something you should read or reflect on often:
[Beginning of post]
Momentum comes from decision. Decision is not wishy-washy, it is concrete, absolute and unwavering, unless there is evidence to support a change in direction. You can use the five buck a day method to make your task(s) less daunting and action enforcer to help with structuring your time, but the base to all these things is the decision to DO.
we’ll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere… and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together guys.
– Hitch Hikers Guide To The Galaxy
My personal observation on life is there a tendency to make things way more difficult than they are, which is why the HHGTTG quote is a favorite. The whole of civilization changed because of that one action, banging the rocks together – does it get any simpler than that? Bang the rocks, get fire, repeat — and there’s the other secret.
There is deciding on the task, and being able to do the task – and we all know practice make perfect. Every musician, athlete and writer knows that. And again, it’s easy to over analyze… just DO.
For pretty much any endeavor the plan is this…
1. read about the subject until it gets repetitious
2. learn your tools
3. practice
4. goto 1
“When I came home from work I sat down and I forced myself to code for a hour or two. The enemy was thinking, whenever I paused or started to think I would force myself to type something, its amazing how much you can get done when you just type. For that business (POF) its just a matter of repetition and fighting boredom. At the end of the day you just need to sit down and DO it. Most people don’t.”
–Markus Frind, PlentyOfFish.com (1.6 Billion pages per month, $10M, 1 person business)
I just spoke with a client/friend/partner and had to explain to them how to open a new tab in firefox – yes, they didn’t know firefox and every other modern browser has tabs! By the way, they gross a few million per year. What do they do? Write. Lots. And Lots. And… LOTS.
Did you put in your “10,000 hours” as Malcom Gladwell suggests?
Do you read Seth Godin every day?
Are you prolific?
Picasso painted over 20,000 paintings and is only known for a few of them. I have an original poster from 1953 of “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon”, printed for his Cubism Exhibition in Paris. It reminds me that out of quantity comes quality (remember what I said about practice).
All of this said, I believe the word momentum is inaccurate in describing the problem at hand, since momentum is a property of the physical world.
* Momentum is the product of the mass and velocity.
* Newtons First Law: Every body remains in a state of rest or uniform motion unless it is acted upon by an external force.
However, in this instance we are talking about the human mind, which exists outside physical laws, which is how I can jump from relaxing in front to the TV to being deep in the code of a website in a matter of seconds. The only physical limitation is the time it takes to walk to the computer and load the web page, the mental limitation is my enthusiasm to DO the task.
As long as it is not impossible, then really the only limitation to doing is choosing to do and hopefully the enthusiasm to do. But even then what is impossible? As the old saying goes, “we can do the impossible right away, miracles take a little longer”.
It was believed that man could not run a mile in 4 minutes, and yet as soon as the barrier was broken by Roger Bannister, many people were able to do it.
Why? Perhaps their brains got in the way of their physical abilities.
My attitude has always been I can do anything I put my mind to, and if I am not successful at a chosen task, it’s just that it hasn’t “clicked” for me yet. The “click” only comes from repetition (practice), investigating new routes and methods until my brain somehow gets it and the Ah-Ha moment it needs to change a difficult task into the ordinary.
And I guess I should not leave before mentioning catch-22 of doing. When I taught hypnotherapy, one of the first things I pointed out was that you will never be able to hypnotize anyone until you believed you could, and you would never believe you could until you had done it. The trick? Just do it…
Make the decision, take a deep breath, hope to hell it will work, and just DO.
[End of post]
When we’re talking about the human mind, and the miracles that can come out of its ability to figuratively move mountains, nothing is impossible. Certainly not something as simple as making a reasonable amount of money from your computer.
So if you’re stymied currently by not being able to even make $50 a day, hang in there. Learn the skills. Watch the other people that are already doing what you want to do. Hang out with them (I like to think Earn1KaDay is an excellent place to do that, by the way, but each to their own).
And the most important thing, which is what my hangup was for 3 long unproductive years. Take action, sure. But more than that…
Take action until it has produced a definitive result. Some actions won’t work out. I teach that “failure is your friend”. Nobody’s going to succeed all the time.
So according to the law of momentum, if your action is not producing positive results, stop the action, stop the negative momentum.
And then start another action, and one of these days, you’ll find an activity that is truly bringing positive results. Once you’ve got that momentum going, unless you or another external force acts on it, it will stay in motion.
It’s a beautiful thing. I hope you experience it soon.
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