It's all about momentum, innit?

In physics and in your life, the only metric you should care about is momentum.

I enjoy rally games. What made them truly click for me is understanding that rally driving is all about weight transfer. A car is a spring, and any of your inputs, throttle, brake or steering, unsettles the 1000 kg of steel you're controlling in a particular direction. If you brake too hard, most of the weight moves forward, your steering wheels will have better grip but could easily lock up; the back of the car lifts and sends you spinning. If you steer too hard in one direction, the lateral forces could make you tip over. This phenomenon is especially noticeable when driving older rally cars, which do not have modern tyres and quick-responding engines. You need to remain mindful that you are controlling a hunk of metal moving at large speed, and you need to apply the least amount of force to nudge it in the direction you want. The last thing you want to do is to be abrupt with your inputs and velocity changes.

People naturally resist change, and even more so as they get older. We pursue the ideal of being flexible and agile, but that's all aspirational nonsense that is often demanded of us, despite the reality that deep down we are more akin to freight trains, let alone rally cars. Slow to start, slow to change direction, and only once we get going the magic happens.

Take the mandated two weeks of yearly holidays, for example. Have they ever been restorative? After a whole year of being immersed in your work, worrying about your daily chores, it's going to take a while to switch off, and a while longer to actually start to get used to the fact that you are in an unfamiliar setting, sleeping in an unknown bed. Why even subject yourself to all this stress for little benefit, one wonders. Your habits and routine condition your momentum, and anything unfamiliar, even if it is sitting on a lovely beach, will feel uncomfortable, and uncomfortable again readjusting to working 40 hours a week.

In the past 3 years I have picked up the habit of dedicating the morning hours of 9 to noon for creative, mental work. Every morning starts a blank slate, the stresses of yesterday hopefully digested and integrated into my psyche by sleep. What I quickly learned is that whatever I do in the first hour after waking up will set the tone for the entire day. If I read social media, my head will fill with nonsense I truly don't give a shit about, and will develop into a thirst for quick dopamine which escalates as the day rolls by. Any action, really, will set me in a particular direction and then it's too late to do anything about it. The only thing that has been working for me is to be completely intolerant of any distractions in the morning. Until noon, my phone is silenced. My email client is closed. Social media is blocked on all my devices. My chores and admin work are scheduled for the afternoon. This routine doesn't always work out, urgent matters might waste my precious morning, and it's healthy to accept that I can try and salvage the rest of the day, not to end up scrolling the internet all day.

Cal Newport talks about this exact idea in his book about deep work, but deep work is the just the result of being mindful of your momentum, of being the conductor of a freight train. Truly, the difference between your TV-bingeing self and your dream of being a writer has never been about willpower, or practice, or to never have acquired a taste for the liquor. It is all about being extremely jealous of your attention, setting aside time to pursue your craft and changing your whole life around this dream of yours. The train needs enough space to maneuver and to get going. On the other hand, creativity has never been about sheer effort; you don't need much sweating to go far. Consistency is key. Thirty minutes a day are much better than one day a week.

I will talk about habits, and capturing high-entropy spurts of creative energy in another post.