SUMMARY 

• Your problem isn’t finishing things, your problem is that you haven’t learned to create enough momentum that will carry you through and complete whatever you’d like to get done.
• Today I’m going to teach you three simple techniques that you can use to create more momentum in your business and life.
• Unless you create more momentum many of your goals, perhaps even most, will go unachieved. 
• Number one: Get into the habit of creating momentum by simply “choosing to start for just five minutes.” Choosing brings a sense of control, since you can choose to do anything regardless of whether you would like doing it. Focusing on the start is less overwhelming than focusing on the finish. And my committing to only 5 minutes you virtually always have the time (and you end up never realizing when the 5 minutes was up!)
• Number two: Go public. I want you to IPO your ideas, IPO your intent, go public with whatever it is that you’re going to do. Because when you create that peer pressure and let the world know what it is that you want to achieve you’re compelled to act.
• Number three: Make it painful. We move towards pleasure in life, and we move away from pain. Putting money on the line, in some form, against your goal completion hacks into our natural instinct to avoid loss, which according to behavioral scientists from Yale University can significantly increase the odds of goal achievement.

TRANSCRIPT

Your problem isn’t finishing things, your problem is that you haven’t learned to create enough momentum that will carry you through and get the things that you want to get done done. So today I’m going to teach you three simple hacks, three simple techniques that you can do to create way more momentum in your business and life. And unless you create more momentum in your business and life, many of your goals, perhaps even most, will go unachieved. So make sure you stick around for the full message today so you can really up your game on the momentum front.

Hi, name is Eric Partaker and I help entrepreneurs, CEOs, leaders, close that gap between their current self and their best self. I really want you to reach your fullest potential in everything it is that you do. And today we’re talking about the subject of momentum, because I don’t want you thinking that where you are, where you aren’t in life is a result of you not being able to finish things. I want to flip the script here. I want you to think it’s more about how do you create more momentum in your life?

An object in motion, once in motion, tends to stay in motion. Or you roll that snowball that starts to roll down the hill and eventually it becomes this big snowball boulder. Actually, I’ve never even seen that in my life, a big snowball boulder. But you know what I mean, conceptually, the idea of something gathering momentum, right? And it starts to get force and starts to build as it grows and as it continues to progress. Well, that’s what I want you to be experiencing in your life, so that the finishing sort of almost just happens on its own. So we’re going to talk about three techniques here. Make sure you stick around for the whole message today so you can take advantage of all three of these techniques.

Number one, the first thing is I want you to get into the habit to create momentum of simply choosing to start for just five minutes. I’ve talked about this in past videos, I know, but it’s so important. And it’s often important to reintroduce these concepts in different ways to really embed the learning within you. So choosing to start for just five minutes. I actually learned this from a gentleman by the name of Dr. Neil Fiore. He’s the author of the book, The Now Habit. And Neil helped me tremendously in the past with overcoming procrastination tendencies and becoming more of a producer. He helped me tremendously to create stronger, more powerful momentum in my life. Exactly what I hope you to achieve after watching today’s message.

So, what will you need to do with choosing to start for just five minutes is simply that. You do not need to want to do everything that you’re doing. You don’t need to want to finish everything that is on your list, but you can always choose to start. And by choosing, you’re taking control, you’re taking agency. You’re not being forced to do something, you’re choosing to do it. And that has a huge impact on your psyche, a huge impact on your ability to create momentum. When you say you have to do something, then it feels like you’re being forced to do something you don’t want to do. That’s immediately going to create resistance. And procrastination will be the way that that manifests. Right? “Well, I don’t want to do something. I’m being asked to do something I don’t want to do.”

But if you choose to do something, if you choose to finish your annual report for your company, or if you choose to finish your tax return… I’m picking things here that not everyone enjoys doing… then you’re in the driver’s seat. And that sends a different message to your brain. It sends a different message to your body, right? You’re in control. So choosing to start. The next key thing is that you’re choosing to start not finish. Remember, we just want to create some momentum here. Starting takes just a nanosecond. I can start at any point, any time and it takes no time at all. Right. I’ve just started the next sentence, for example. So choosing to start.

And then, for just five minutes because, well, five minutes takes no time at all, right? I mean, when I choose to start something for just five minutes and I use that as a tactic to create momentum, I never know when those 300 seconds go by. Never know at all. They just pass and suddenly, I’m just lost in the depth of whatever it is that I’m working on. So, that’s the first thing that you can do to create momentum, to take the focus off of finishing things is just to choose to start for five minutes, for just five minutes.

The next thing that you can do to create more momentum in your life is go public. I want you to IPO your ideas, IPO your intent, go public with whatever it is that you’re going to do. Because when you create that peer pressure and let the world know what it is that you want to achieve or what it is that you want to do, well, it’s sort of like you’re putting your life up on a big public scoreboard, right? And when we see a scoreboard in play, what do we want to do? We want to see a winning score. And going public is a way to trigger that inherent desire in us to want to win, right, and to want to do what we say that we’re going to do. Right? We feel that peer pressure and that creates momentum, then once again, because suddenly we feel like… We’re compelled to act. We can’t let people down now. We’ve just told them about…

I’ve done this in a couple of instances recently. So, one was a course that I built. It was called ScaleUp Yourself. The whole idea with the course was just helping a participant close the gap between their current and their best self, help them live a fuller life, not just in the work front, but also in the health and the home fronts. And I didn’t even have the course made. But what I did with the course together with the person who’s on the other side of this camera, actually, who you can’t see at the moment, but Stephane. He’s absolute video genius, by the way. He helps me with all my video/audio design stuff. So, big shout out to Stephane.

But what Stephane and I did was that we just got the message out there that the course is going to begin on such and such a date. And we started taking registrations for it. And that created momentum because people were paying for something. And we had to then create. And on a weekly basis, all we did was we created our set of worksheets that we would use for that week’s session. And then we would deliver the session. And then the next session would come up and we would create the worksheets for that session and we’d deliver that session. And by the time we finished the whole course, we actually had a filmed, complete eight-session course called ScaleUp Yourself that only existed because we created momentum. We created momentum by going public on it and by announcing when the course was going to be and starting to take money for it before it was even made.

Now, there’s other ways in which you can do this, I’m sure, in your business or life. If you’re writing a book, you can announce to all the people on your email list or to your family and friends when it’s going to be published. You can make a promise that it will be ready in time for them to use as Christmas presents, for example. But take a moment. Pause here. Take a moment and think. Is there a goal or something that you’re looking to achieve that’s been kind of sitting for a while? Well, how could you create some momentum there by going public with it? Right. How could you announce it to a group of people close to you, such that you don’t want to let those people down? How can you make a public commitment?

So, that’s the third thing, go public. First thing, once again, was just choose to start for just five minutes. That’s a great momentum driver. Second great momentum driver is going public.

And last but not least, one of my favorite momentum drivers of all, and this is going to sound a little bit weird, is creating pain. Now, we move towards pleasure in life, we move away from pain. And I don’t mean, literally, physical pain. I’m really getting at fiscal pain, financial pain. So this is linked to some behavioral scientists’ research out of Yale University, which found that we as human beings, we are much, much more inclined to avoid losing something than we are to gain something. I mean, it’s hard-coded within our DNA. It’s a survival thing, right? We don’t want to risk losing the food we have to gain more. Let’s at least keep what we have.

Now, this is incredibly powerful because when we seek to create momentum, it’s for what cause? It’s to gain something, right? We want to create momentum because we want to achieve a goal, we want to gain something. But focusing then on the gain as the way to create momentum isn’t the right way to go about it. We want to create a pressure point. And we do that by putting some money on the line. As simple as that sounds. That’s some of the most compelling research that I’ve come across lately, again, from Yale University, showing that if we risk losing something, if we tap into this hard-coded loss aversion within us, within our DNA, this tendency to be more inclined to avoid losing something than to gain something.

And if we do that by simply placing a bet, making a bet with family or friends, or saying, “If I don’t complete this task or this project by this time, I’m going to pay you this money.” Or perhaps, “I’m going to donate this money to a cause that maybe you don’t even like.” Actually, there’s an amazing website called stickK that does exactly that, by the way. So, you can literally register your credit card details with the site and you pick what they call an anti-charity, so a cause or a charitable event that you absolutely are against, so you wouldn’t want to donate your money to. And now you’re getting a double whammy on the loss of aversion here, a double whammy on the creation of pain to help you create momentum, because you stand to lose money and you stand to lose it to a cause that you absolutely hate. So, take a look at that as a side note. It might be interesting for you.

So today, in summary, it was all about how, instead of focusing on not finishing things, how you can create more momentum in your life, get that ball rolling. Once in motion, an object tends to stay in motion. And I’ve given you three simple hacks or techniques that you can use to create that momentum, choose to start for just five minutes, go public and create pain. Put some money on the line, or perhaps even double whammy it and have that money also go to a cause that you don’t like. So I hope you’ve enjoyed that. And if you head over to my website at ericpartaker.com, you can also subscribe to my weekly Peak Performance Insights Newsletter.