How do you gain momentum?

Not a physics article. I hope I didn’t lose most of you by now… So basically a few months ago, I experienced a situation where I felt like I was unable to transform my ideas and thoughts into actions. I knew beforehand that anything I said, anything I committed to, was very vulnerable and I was bound to not keep my word.

I remember one night I was thinking about all the things I was afraid of doing, and in my head, running was the thing I feared that bothered me the most. I was terrified to run because in my head running was a nightmare. a pure nightmare. I hated it, for many reasons. One, it made me tired, two, it bored the shit out of me, and three, I was convinced that I couldn’t run. I thought I was literally unable to run correctly and exercise for a long time. I preferred workouts including high-intensity exercises instead of long periods of distress like a 40 min run.

That night, before falling asleep, I committed t doing something and spoke to my phone -recording myself- and my words were something like ‘tomorrow I will go for a run and I am committed that I will do it whatever the case.’ I was also planning on shooting a youtube video for it. This seems so ridiculously funny right now…

Anyway. The next morning, I failed. As expected. I was so disappointed in myself. At that period in my life, I was a complete failure in my eyes. Confused about what I wanted and very angry sometimes with myself. Sometimes struggling to even get out of bed, because of the lack of something interesting to do on certain days!

So how can you even get out of this situation?

Well, you can always start doing stuff. The most classic answer. But I cannot stress the importance of it. So, if you feel paralyzed by a pile of crap you have created for yourself, then you better crawl up that dumpster. The way to crawl out of this is to actually wake up every day with a goal. Maybe the goal for day 1 is to cook pasta. I don’t know. Maybe the goal of another day is to call someone you love and let them know you love them. Slowly, you might find yourself being able to do more than one thing per day… after that, it is progress.

And how do you build momentum? Once you start, you have committed. You cannot break any promise you have made to yourself. And the most interesting thing about this is that the deeper you get into the commitment, the harder it is for you to break a promise… This is power.