Monday Musing: Riley McKibbin, momentum, and objects staying in motion

Earlier this week, Riley McKibbin put up a post on social media that got me thinking.

“Building momentum is everything as a creator,” he wrote. “And I believe that from my own experience. But as an athlete, I’ve always been torn on the idea of momentum and never truly bought into it. Started wondering how I could believe in one version and not the other.”

What a thought.

My initial reaction was that the momentum of a creator and that of an athlete are two wholly different things: A creator’s momentum is physical, tangible; you can see what you’re creating, be it written or video or audio or any other manner of art. You therefore have more to work with, more material to shape, more content to add, a product to refine. An athlete’s momentum is, to me, mental. We score a point, two points, three points, and somehow the Gods are now smiling down upon us, rewarding points with more points by the sheer virtue of having scored previous points. There is a case to be made that athletic momentum is physical as well. When I was a golfer, I could physically feel my swing falling into a groove, and I knew I could take aggressive lines with my driver, go for approach shots I wouldn’t otherwise go for. Same with shooting in basketball or serving in volleyball: You just feel different, somehow.

But momentum’s a fickle mistress when you’re an athlete. Fall into the trap of believing momentum is on your side, what happens when you push your drive into the trees, when your high line misses wide, when your 3-pointer hits back iron?

Do you feel the wind drop out of your sails? Does that lead suddenly feel smaller? The deficit bigger? Do the greens look smaller, fairways tighter, when that momentum – which is really just a boost in confidence, justified or otherwise – fades?

If you relied on momentum, rather than simply treating each individual hole or point or possession as an independent event — as Michael Gervais says, “there are no big moments, every moment is a big moment.” — that’s a possibility.

It reminds me of David Goggins, a former Navy SEAL now turned American badass, an ultramarathoner who cranked out 4,030 pullups in 17 hours. He refuses to listen to music while he runs, because doing so provides external motivation, and “what happens,” he says, “when the music stops?”

What happens when what we’re doing ceases becoming a product of our own internal drive, our own practice, our own abilities, and is sourced from something as intangible as momentum?

We lose it.

But creating, in my mind, is different. An object in motion — be it a book, a story, a vlog — stays in motion. Often the most difficult part of writing or creating is getting started. The best way to start, then, is to just start. From anywhere. Beginning, middle, end, doesn’t matter. Because once you start, once you get that ball rolling, it becomes difficult to stop until you’re finished, or have a working draft.

The more you create, in my mind, the more you create. Creativity begets creativity. That’s momentum.

The real battle, then, isn’t on momentum, and how to maintain it, but in your discipline in starting, the initial nudge to get the ball moving downhill. Steven Pressfield wrote an entire book on this very concept in the phenomenal War of Art.

Every day, he wrote, there is a battle being waged, between our Inner Muse and what he dubs The Resistance. Our Inner Muse wants to create, wants us to do the hard thing. The Resistance wants us to take the easy route, to hit the snooze button, to keep our laptops closed, to watch Netflix instead. The more The Resistance wins, the more intimidating our project seems.

Our momentum stalls.

But as The Muse collects victories, we see our project growing, we see the finish line nearing. We love that. So we do even more.

We create momentum, so to speak.

In a way, then, discipline begets momentum.

I have been writing as my profession since I was 16. For 15 years, I’ve been accruing disciplined practices to write, and I can now slip into what is being popularized as a “flow state” virtually on command, for I know what gets me there as a writer. It has reached a point where if I go a day – hell, half a day – without writing, I begin to lose my mind a bit. I wonder if it’s the writing I crave, or the flow state, the momentum, in which my brain turns while I write.

There is nothing like entering a flow state for an hour or two as a writer. You look up and suddenly you have 2,000 words written in what felt like 10 minutes. The comedown from that is real. My brain turns to mush for the next few hours, which is why I write first and workout second; I don’t need my brain to function all that great while I work out or practice, and exercising recharges the batteries, so to speak.

Momentum, as a creator, looks a lot like flow to me. And momentum is a product of discipline.

And discipline, as Jocko Willink says, equals freedom. Freedom from everything but the moment you’re in.

Get some discipline.

Get some momentum.

Go get some.