The Physics Of Starting

Momentum (p) = mass (m) × velocity (v)

There’s a particular quality of despair that accompanies creative paralysis. Not the dramatic anguish of the tortured artist, but something more mundane and therefore more devastating. The way you can know exactly what you need to be doing and find yourself utterly incapable of doing it. How you have mapped every step of the journey and still find yourself unable to take the first one.

This internal war feels almost physical. Every muscle in your body seems to argue against forward movement. Your rational mind presents bulletproof evidence that the action is necessary, beneficial, even urgent. But some deeper part of you simply refuses to cooperate. You become a spectator to your own resistance, watching yourself choose distraction over action, scrolling over starting, rumination over execution.

The fear becomes louder than any creative impulse. What if I’m not good enough? What if this is terrible? What if people see through me? The terror of being exposed as basic, unoriginal, insufficient drowns out everything else. So you postpone. Tomorrow will be different. Next week you’ll be ready. After you research more, plan better, feel more prepared.

But postponing only compounds the problem. Without momentum, excitement about tomorrow becomes impossible. The work feels heavier each day you avoid it, like laundry that multiplies in the hamper.

The neuroscience reveals something fascinating about this paralysis. When you imagine performing an action, your motor cortex fires in patterns nearly identical to actually performing it. Your brain doesn’t clearly distinguish between simulated action and real action. By the time you’re genuinely visualizing the work, part of you has already begun.

This explains why visualization can sometimes backfire. If your brain has already experienced the satisfaction of completion through imagination, the actual work can feel redundant. You’ve already gotten the neurochemical reward without doing anything at all.

But it also suggests a pathway forward. If imagining can feel like doing, then the smallest actual movement can feel like momentum.

Psychologists have identified something called psychological momentum, a perceptual phenomenon where a series of small successes creates a sense of growing inevitability. It’s not just about individual achievements but about a shift in identity where success begins to feel natural rather than accidental. Research shows this state enables performance at levels not ordinarily possible.

When someone achieves genuine momentum, everything changes. The quality of attention becomes effortless, almost involuntary. Ideas connect in unexpected ways. They follow tangents that turn out to be essential. Most remarkably, they stop thinking “I should write” and start thinking “I’m a writer writing.” The action flows from identity rather than fighting against it.

In this state, you feel fully alive, present, optimistic. You become the main character in your own life. Thoughts feel lighter. The gap between intention and action narrows to almost nothing. Pattern recognition creates its own energy as you notice progress and small wins. Dopamine flows. The cycle accelerates.

Momentum (p) = mass (m) × velocity (v)

Mass represents accumulated effort, experience, and the material you’ve gathered. Velocity is how quickly you move from idea to action. Velocity is how quickly you move from idea to action. Once you have enough mass, momentum compounds and pushes you forward with decreasing effort. Forward motion attracts more opportunities, making progress feel increasingly effortless.

I learned this through my own stumbling path back to writing. Instead of trying to force myself to write for hours, I started with the smallest possible actions. Day one: open the document. Don’t write — just look at the cursor blinking. Day two: type one word. Day three: delete that word and type another.

I wasn’t writing yet. I was teaching my nervous system that the document wasn’t dangerous, that action was possible, that I could trust myself to start without having to finish.

These micro-movements create what I call “embodied permission.” Each tiny action proves to your body that forward motion is possible. They shift your relationship to the work from theoretical to physical, from someday to now.

Traditional productivity advice relies on force and discipline. Set bigger goals. Work harder. Push through resistance. But force creates the very resistance it seeks to overcome. When you assault your own resistance, resistance fights back. The solution is seduction, not assault. Making the action so small, so low-stakes, so barely worth doing that your psychological defenses don’t notice you’ve begun.

The goal becomes activation rather than accomplishment. Start by opening the document. Not to write, just to open it. Pick up the phone without dialing. Walk to your workspace without sitting down. These micro-movements prove to your nervous system that action is possible. They shift your relationship to the work from theoretical to embodied.

Once you’re moving, even slightly, momentum operates bidirectionally. The smallest step creates psychological permission for the next step. Motion builds on motion just as inertia spirals into deeper paralysis.

Most importantly, momentum isn’t something you have. It’s something you become. It’s not a tool but a way of being. The question shifts from “How do I generate momentum?” to “How do I become someone for whom momentum feels natural?”

The answer might be simpler than we imagine. We spend so much energy fighting ourselves, creating elaborate internal negotiations about when and how and whether to begin. What if the deepest work isn’t about generating anything at all, but about removing the obstacles we’ve erected against our own motion?

When you stop getting in your own way and start moving with the current instead of against it, momentum stops being something you create and becomes something you finally allow.

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I’m starting a ritual-building group where we build mindful rituals that will expand our consciousness. Every day at 7 AM ET, we journal together. Not to produce anything profound, just to show up. To move the cursor. To practice the physics of starting until momentum becomes as natural as breathing.

This is your invitation to join.