When you've got to push a car that won't run, what's the most difficult part of the experience? Getting it moving in the first place. You exert great energy through your legs and body, maybe grunting or doing the Valsalva Maneuver. What's that? It's the fancy term for holding your breath to transfer more power through your body.
You've got to work hard to get that beautiful but heavy chunk of metal, plastic, glass and fluids moving. But once it starts moving? Oh then it gets easier and easier. Momentum is on your side.
Woe to you if you let that car stop moving. You'll have to grunt and push hard to get it moving again.
This physical experience applies to everything we do. Things are hard to get moving from rest, but once you do that hard work it's easier to keep it going. It's also easier to make it go faster.
We see this when it comes to basic learning. Studies show school-aged children from wealthier neighborhoods perform better not because of innate differences but in large part because they keep learning over summer break. Kids whose academic and skill development stalls over summer then have to "get moving" again when school starts. That puts them not just 2 months behind kids who kept moving, but 3, 4 or even 5 months behind. And that happens every summer.
We see this when it comes to athletic skill development. When you train competitively for a sport, consistency is key. Yes, planned recovery and planned variety are necessary part of training programs and regimens, but they are short when they you incorporate them intelligently. But what happens if they aren't deliberate but are either the product of poor discipline, emergencies, or (if you're not doing it professionally) "real life" gets in the way?
If you weight train, you know what happens when you slack off for a week, two, or more. It takes you time and effort to get going again, and then you have to play catch up. A week or two is all it takes for you to experience your muscular strength being less than they were before.
My daughter's figure skating coach told us a skater who misses a week of practice usually takes the next two weeks to get back to where they were before. That's a 3-for-1 deal that works against you.
It's not just about physiological performance. Many of the skills we work hard to develop are "perishable." They don't endure like riding on a bike, which comes back to you in just a few moments. The more advanced the skill, the more perishable it is. The more nuance involved in the skill, the more perishable it is.
Skills aren't just things you do with your hands like how to make or fix something. They aren't just intellectual like using a language, coding or using software. They aren't just social, like reading or leading other people.
The following are examples of self-optimization skills:
Getting and keeping your mind into a deep state of flow
Mentally and emotionally recovery and resetting after mistakes or setbacks
Mentally and emotionally amping up or dialing down by choice
Creating, "hacking" or changing habit patterns
Like everything else we've been talking about, momentum, catchup and perishability are all at play with these oft-unrecognized skills.
The basic principle with all of this is momentum, or what Jim Collins the author of Good to Great has termed "The Flywheel Effect". A flywheel is a weighted disc that takes significant energy to get spinning, but once it gets spinning it can stay spinning for quite some time and gets easier and easier to spin faster and faster.
Whether in business or in life, collective or individual, with matters physical, mental, emotional or some combination of them, the Flywheel Effect is in play.
Getting started is the most difficult part. It takes the most effort. It's where you'll stumble, fall and fail most often. It's where discouragement can be most high.
But if you keep at it, you'll see progress. It'll come slowly at first, and at great effort. But then it gets easier and progress is more evident. Eventually you find you're moving at a good speed and it doesn't take much to keep things going.
There's bad news though. When we're talking about physical processes and activities, the limits of physics or physiology become more important and marginal improvement again takes significant energy. There's something at play called the Mastery Curve that makes things more difficult again once you get to the very leading edge of performance.
But the good news is this, and it more than outweighs the bad news: you will be performing excellently well before you reach the challenges of the leading edge. You will reap the benefit of momentum, you'll have the flywheel spinning fast, you'll experience and perform with excellence through much of the straight-line portion of the Mastery Curve.
That means you'll be significantly blessing others and experiencing blessing and fulfillment once you get on the "Main Phase" of your Mastery Curve. Get that flywheel moving and it'll spin faster and faster for the same effort. Get that car moving and the total distance you have to push it won't be so daunting.
Soli Deo Gloria.
Yπερνικᾶτε ἐν Χριστῷ. "Let us go be more than conquerors in Christ"