The Momentum Method
I’ve written before about incrementalism, and I still believe in it.
There’s something elegant about doing a little bit every day. Ten minutes of practice, one better meal, a walk around the block, a few pages, one small improvement stacked on top of another, until eventually, something meaningful has been built.
A lot of real change happens that way, quietly and gradually, almost invisibly at first. And for many people, that works beautifully.
But there’s a weakness in incrementalism that doesn’t get talked about enough.
The feedback loop can be slow.
You start eating better, but the scale barely moves. You start exercising, but your body feels more or less the same. You begin learning piano, and after a week you’re still stumbling through the basics. You start reading about a new topic, and instead of feeling smarter, you mostly become aware of how much there is to learn.
That’s normal, of course, but normal doesn’t always help. The effort is real, but the return can be too subtle, and when the return is too subtle, it becomes very easy to drift.
That’s where a lot of people quietly lose the thread.
They’re doing the sensible thing. They’re eating a little better, moving a little more, practicing the skill, reading the book, making the effort. But nothing has really happened yet, at least not in a way they can feel. And when there’s no obvious sign of progress, the whole thing starts to feel a bit abstract.
You know it’s probably good for you. You know it might pay off eventually. But “eventually” isn’t always enough to get you out the door, away from the snacks, onto the piano bench, or back to the page.
That’s the gap The Momentum Method is designed to close.
The Momentum Method is about creating enough early movement that you can actually feel something begin to shift. It isn’t about being reckless, turning your life upside down in a burst of manic self-improvement, or punishing yourself into becoming a more impressive person. It’s about hitting the same goal from several angles at once, so change has a better chance of showing up early.
I think the seed of this idea was planted years ago when I took a Learning Annex class with Barry Farber, who spoke an astonishing number of languages. His advice for learning a new language wasn’t to do one tiny thing and hope it slowly accumulated. His advice was to bombard the language from every direction.
Get a phrasebook. Get a grammar book. Listen to radio broadcasts in the language. Watch television in the language. Listen to tapes or CDs (this was decades ago). Read the news in the language. Use flashcards. Keep the language around you in as many forms as possible.
That stayed with me because it made immediate sense. You aren’t asking one method to do all the work. You’re giving the mind many different points of contact. You’re hearing the language, seeing it, speaking little bits of it, reading it, noticing its structure, and letting it become familiar from several directions at once.
That, to me, is the essence of The Momentum Method.
You create enough contact with the thing that it starts to become real sooner.
Take health as an example.
The incremental approach might be, “I’ll drink one more glass of water every day.” And that’s a good thing to do. It’s reasonable, it’s easy to understand, and for some people it may be the exact right starting point.
But The Momentum Method might look more like this: clean the junk out of the kitchen, plan your meals for the week, go for a walk every morning, get to bed thirty minutes earlier, track your protein, book three workouts, and tell a friend what you’re doing.
None of those things are extreme by themselves, but together they create a different kind of week. You’ve changed the conditions around the behaviour so there are more ways for the new pattern to take hold. That’s a very different setup from trying to make one small promise survive inside an unchanged life.
I’ve seen this in my own life.
A couple of years ago, I developed sarcopenia. My muscles were wasting away, and it wasn’t subtle. It was frightening, and it got my attention fast.
Quick interruption from Chris: He's not exaggerating. I called him out on it. I said something like "Dude - you've been focusing on all these long walks and stopped resistance training. What happened to your muscle mass?"
Now back to Mike ...
I could have taken a gentle incremental approach. I could have added one small thing and waited to see what happened. But that didn’t feel like the right response. I wanted a real shift, and I wanted evidence early on that I was moving in the right direction.
So I took massive action. I started taking creatine. I increased high-quality protein. I began doing muscle-building exercises regularly, and I treated the whole thing as a serious project rather than a vague intention.
The result was astonishing.
I’m more muscular now at 73 than I was in my 30s.
And I don’t say that as a prescription for anyone else, because everyone’s body and circumstances are different. I say it because it taught me something important about momentum. When you hit something from several directions at once, the body and mind often get a much clearer message. The change becomes real sooner, and that early reality gives you more reason to keep going.
That matters because early evidence becomes fuel.
Once people begin to feel change, motivation stops being theoretical. It’s no longer an idea on a vision board or a sentence in a journal. It’s in the body, in the day, and in the way you begin to recognize that the process has already started doing something.
There’s a very different feeling between hoping a process will work and having even a small amount of evidence that it has begun.
Momentum also reduces the number of cold starts.
Without momentum, every action feels like a fresh negotiation. You have to decide whether you’re going to work out, practice, read, study, write, or stick to whatever plan you made when you were in a more ambitious state of mind. That gets tiring fast.
But when momentum is present, the next step has a different feel. You’ve already begun, you’ve already seen a little evidence, and you’ve interrupted the old pattern enough times that continuing feels more natural than starting from scratch again.
Of course, this can go wrong.
Some people confuse momentum with intensity. They go too hard, too fast, and then collapse. They start a brutal diet, a punishing workout routine, a twelve-part morning ritual, a new business, a meditation practice, a language course, cold plunges, journaling, breathwork, meal prep, and a promise to become unrecognizable by Thursday.
That isn’t momentum. That’s panic disguised as discipline.
The Momentum Method has to be intelligent. It has to be built around energy, recovery, and reality. The question isn’t, “How much can I force myself to do?” A better question is, “What combination of changes would make progress noticeable sooner?”
If you want to write, don’t just promise yourself you’ll write one sentence a day and then hope the habit magically grows. Clear two or three mornings, make a list of ideas, set up the space, tell someone you’ll send them a draft, read a few writers who make you want to write, and then write badly on purpose until the machine starts moving.
If you want to learn a subject, don’t just buy the book and let it sit there radiating guilt. Watch an introductory lecture, make a simple map of the topic, join a community, schedule the study sessions, teach one idea to someone else, and give yourself a small project that forces the knowledge to become useful.
The point is to create a cluster of changes that support each other. One action can disappear into the noise of the day, but a whole system is harder to miss. And when that system starts producing even small results, those results become fuel.
This is where incrementalism and The Momentum Method can work beautifully together.
You might use momentum to get started, then incrementalism to keep going. A burst of intelligent, multi-angle change can create the early signal, and then small daily practices can stabilize it. You don’t have to live forever in high intensity. In fact, you probably shouldn’t.
Momentum gets the wheel turning, and incrementalism keeps it turning.
So maybe the question isn’t, “Which approach is better?” Maybe the better question is, “What kind of change does this moment require?”
Some goals need patience and gentle consistency. Some goals need a bigger interruption. Some seasons of life call for one small step, and others call for clearing the room, drawing a line, and creating enough change that you can feel the future beginning to move.
And when that happens, you stop waiting to feel motivated.
You start giving yourself evidence.
And evidence is one of the most persuasive forces there is.
- Mike Mandel
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