Momentum is Not Usually Conserved

 During a long bus ride, I asked one of my most cracked coding friends how he practiced for upwards of 6 hours a day without getting demotivated or feeling unproductive. His response was quite simple, “whenever you feel terrible, just take a shower.”

To that I replied, “you can’t shower 5 times a day.” The small group listening in all laughed, and while I smiled at the joke, it masked the reality that I actually meant what I said.

See, whenever I practiced competitive programming, or did anything for that matter, I would expect a decent level of progress. So if I spent an hour on a problem just to find the solution to be simple, or “wasted” time debugging a single line, it would kill any motivation I had. And unfortunately, the inverse doesn't hold. The feeling of gratitude from every hard problem I solved quickly, or a cool concept I learned, was disproportionately short-lived.

In general, I think it's a lot harder to lose than to gain momentum. And while this seemed unfair to me at first, I think it's because we don’t give ourselves nearly enough credit for what we do. The required physical, mental, and emotional state to do most things (like practice competitive programming) is already quite high, so the fact that we have the motivation to start doing something is already impressive.

But because we’re already feeling “great”, it becomes a lot easier to become relatively worse. And when that happens, it becomes difficult to justify continued effort. I think being cognizant of that is important, because it's impossible to maintain momentum forever, but it is possible to manage our expectations.

And I don’t mean to say that people have generally high expectations of their productivity, I honestly think the opposite (that most people think they’re getting stuff done, but aren’t really— me included). But, at least for me, the few minutes spent scrolling or replying to texts disproportionately mess with my momentum. Realizing that a continuous push is only an asymptotic goal can help us “bounce back” from these minor lapses.

Ideally, we should all optimize for maximum momentum, pushing as hard as we can most of the time. But, inevitably, this is unsustainable and even out of our control. So the next best thing to learn is the ability to bounce back whenever your momentum falters.