How to Find & Keep Building Momentum

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. You probably heard an ad before the show. Just want to level set: That's something we're going to be doing going forward as we prepare for our first sponsorship that kicks off next month. I'm excited to share more great information going forward about what it means for the growth of our show. But now let's hop into it. Today, I am talking about the formula for creating and keeping momentum in business, in your career, and in building a startup. Let's do it. 

So a few days ago, I was reading a number of essays by one of my favorite, both writers and founders, and that is Sam Altman. Sam Altman is one of the founders of Y Combinator, which is probably the most famous startup accelerator in the world. It's responsible for, you know, incubating Airbnb, DoorDash, Stripe, just tons of billion-dollar businesses that were built within the accelerator. So I was reading a bunch of articles by Sam Altman, but the one that stood with me the most was his piece on startup advice.

Basically he wrote a 95 item list of the best startup advice that he had given to founders over the last however many decades of building Y Combinator or advice that he had heard other founders give to his portfolio companies within Y Combinator. I read through all 95 of them and, you know, maybe next episode or a few episodes from now, I can talk through more of his pieces of advice and my thoughts on them, but I wanted to focus on one of his pieces of advice and I wanted to go deeper with it. Number 27 in Sam Altman's list, is quote: Momentum is critical. Don't lose it. End quote, that is it.

Why momentum is critical

And that resonated with me so much because over the last six years of building Morning Brew, I can't tell you how many times I thought about this concept of momentum. I thought about it because I felt like people don't talk enough about the importance of momentum when building a company. There were points in morning brew's history when it felt like everything was on our side and we were on top of the world and we could do everything well, like we could grow well, we could launch new products well, we could hire new people well, and that was because we felt like we had incredible momentum. And then there were points in the business generally before we started going full-time on it when I was still working in finance and Austin was still in college when it didn't feel like we were growing fast enough. I remember distinctly points in the business where growth was flat and it felt like we had no momentum.

And it was a really debilitating feeling of being like we're working so hard on this business and the growth isn't showing that. And then I just started thinking more about Momentum and it made me think back on so much of the other things that I've talked about on the show and thought about recently. It made me think about a conversation that I had with two startup founders that were pitching me on their business earlier this week, when I asked them what would be the thing that would make them saddest if their business failed a year from now, one of the founders answered, “It's such a hard question for me to answer because I don't see failure as feasible. We were given literally 150 “no”s by investors before finally getting a big-name VC to see what we saw in our vision. That period of time was the hardest in our lives, but we feel like we can push through anything now.” 

What he said to me is the definition of momentum. He pushed, pushed, and pushed. They both did until there was some big breakthrough within their business. They just wanted it more than everyone and they spent more time than everyone was willing to spend on it. Momentum really is the most powerful thing in life, career, and building a business. It's so hard to create, but once you have it, you want to do everything possible not to lose it. It's not visible, but we all absolutely feel it at so many different points in our careers.

The formula for creating momentum

So the question becomes, how do we create momentum and how do we keep it once we have it? As I reflected on this question, I tried thinking about a playbook or, or a formula. And I believe there is a simple formula for creating and keeping momentum. Now it's not easy. It is not easy at all to create momentum or to keep it, but it is simple what you need to do to make it happen. And here's the formula: Momentum equals action plus desire plus reflection. I'm going to say that one more time. Momentum is equal to taking action, having desire, and being thoughtful or reflecting. So now I'm going to break down each one and talk about why you need each of these ingredients to create the recipe that is momentum. 

Action 

Let's start with action. For so many reasons, we fail to take action in our careers. Sometimes we fail to take action because of laziness. We end up prioritizing short-term pleasure over long-term gain by focusing on so many distractions that life puts in front of us that diverts our attention from the things that truly matter. Think about watching TV or movies, eating and drinking, checking social media, basically all of the things in life that give us cheap pleasures and are far easier than taking action on things that are less fun, short-term, but give us far more joy and fulfillment long-term. Building a successful business, super fulfilling longterm, but it sucks for so long in the short term. And by the way, I just want to make clear here. This episode is as much an anthem for me, as it is for my listeners. Writing this episode today was a challenge for me. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to have profound thoughts on momentum. I wanted it to be both general enough for all of my listeners to benefit from, but specific enough with stories that didn't make it feel preachy and high level. During the time of writing this episode and researching for it, I went to the refrigerator three times to get drinks and snacks.

I checked Twitter about 15 times, and I constantly chose those cheap pleasures over action while scripting and I don't feel great about it. The other reason so many of us don't choose to take action is because of uncertainty or fear. A startup founder is fearful that their idea won't work, so they never ended up building. Someone who's in a great job that they've been in for a long time, who's respected at their company and paid well is uncertain if they should take informational calls from recruiters or actively start seeing what other jobs are out there in order to resteep in their learning curve. We're also just all fearful of failure. We're worried that we're not going to succeed. That failure will be painful for us. That society will judge us for our failures. So we decide that it is easier not to take action so we don't risk the pain of failure, but you see without action, there is no momentum. It's not possible. 

Desire

Next up is desire. You see, not all action is created equal. If all action was the same, every employee at every company who did anything or took any sort of action, would all be as good as one another or every founder who decided to take the action to actually start building their business around an idea they had would succeed in the same way every other founder would.

But obviously that's not how the world works. The thing that differentiates everyone's actions is desire or effort. Simply put, how bad do you want it? Desire is what determines the intensity of the action that you take and how long you take that action for. I'm going to get mathematical for just one second. It was just a fun exercise for me to do and I think you'll enjoy thinking about it. In preparing for this episode, I literally looked up Newton's laws of motion to understand just how well the defining laws of physics apply to this concept of momentum in our careers and in business. And simply put it's perfectly applicable.

We're talking about creating momentum, right? So, according to Newton, the way that you change momentum or create momentum is through force and force is the combination of mass and acceleration. You as a founder or as a professional or as an employee, you are mass. You are what ultimately creates momentum. The thing that's in motion, the thing that's moving, the thing that's accelerating is you, but acceleration is the combination of velocity and time. So going back to the second part of the momentum formula, I believe desire is entirely what creates velocity in time.

Desire is what gets you to push harder than any other professional or entrepreneur will dare to push and desire is what gets you to push for a longer period of time than anyone else would push for hence velocity, the actual speed at which you're pushing, and time, the length for which you're pushing at that speed. And there are just so many stories I think back to in my own career as an entrepreneur, as well as other stories as builders that illustrate the power of desire. Those two founders that I mentioned earlier, they created momentum because their desire to accomplish their mission, which is tied to financial equity for all, is what got them to push through thousands of hours of venture capital pitches, endure 150 nos, just to get to the one lead investor who would say yes and make it possible for them to keep running their business.

Or Mr Beast, who I've talked about in the past, who has been creating YouTube videos for more than a decade. He dropped out of school to do it. He had no money. He wasn't finding any success for the first several years and he simply just existed longer and pushed harder than everyone else and he now has 70 million subscribers on YouTube. I always think back to this motivational speech by Eric Thomas. 

Eric Thomas Audio Clip: [inaudible] when you want to succeed as bad as you want to breathe, then you'll be successful. I don't know how many y'all got asthma here today. But if you ever had an asthma attack before you short of breath, S O B shortness of breath, you wheezing.

The only thing you trying to do is get some air. You don't care about no basketball game. You don't care what's on TV. You don't care about nobody calling you. You don't care about a party. The only thing you care about when you're trying to breathe is to get some fresh air. That's it.

Alex Lieberman: It's simple. There are some professionals and some entrepreneurs who are relentless. They want it more. They want to prove to themselves that they can achieve greatness at whatever they do as badly as they want to breathe. And they work harder and work longer than anyone else can endure, which brings us to the last part of the equation. We've talked about action. And we've talked about desire 

Reflection 

Now it's about thought. I laugh because I always think back to this famous quote on the definition of insanity, maybe you've heard this quote, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. Action without thought and reflection is just effort without direction. One thing that you can bet on in your career and in building your business is that when you decide to take action, that's an amazing first step, but whatever action you take will likely be an educated guess. You just wanted to get the ball rolling, but you will most likely be wrong and fail many times before you either find success in your job or build a product that the market or your customers want. The way that you give your action direction is by failing and is by reflecting on what you can do differently today given the new information that failing has provided to you that you didn't have when you first took action.

Now there's one final piece to this. Let's say you did take action. Let's say you wanted it more and you wanted it for longer than everyone else. And let's say you knew exactly how you wanted to adjust to accomplish whatever that end goal was. You've created momentum, but how do you keep it? That's just as hard. You see, once your startup has reached critical mass, once you've elevated quickly enough in your company, so many people become complacent, they get comfortable, they go on autopilot. So how do you maintain that momentum that you built through action, effort, and thought? The answer is stupid, simple, but so many of us fail to do it. You simply just keep that same equation going.

You take action. You go harder for longer and you reflect on the action you're taking. See the issue is, is that creating momentum can be exhausting. We end up getting comfortable. We create reasons to coast. We create reasons to rest on our laurels. We feel good about what we're getting paid in our career. We get blind to the fact that we're no longer growing or our learning curve is no longer steep and in doing so, we fail to combine the very three ingredients of action, desire, and thought that created momentum for us in the first place. And so those are my thoughts on not only why momentum is so important, but how you can cultivate momentum in every aspect of your life, but specifically in your career or building your very own business.

I would love to hear your thoughts on momentum. Are you as bought into this concept of why momentum is so important as I am? And do you agree that the three ingredients that I've put in front of you are the crystal key to creating momentum in your career? As always, thank you so much for listening to Founder’s Journal. If you enjoyed the episode, please smash the subscribe button on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whatever podcast player that you listened. That is the number one way to grow the show. Again thank you so much for listening and I'll catch you next episode.