Momentum, Speed, and Failure
Speed is overrated. True success, I believe, marks individuals with scars from fits and starts. These scars emerge from the inevitable tearing of your pride, and. in some cases, flesh.
As a high school wrestler I became intimate with speed, scars. and failure. The first of these, speed, was integral to success. You had to shoot faster, sprawl faster, and think faster than the guy across the mat to win the bout. On many occasions, I failed to think faster and speedily found myself on my back, pinned down, and squirming like a worm under salt. With my eyes pointed at the ceiling, and teammates yelling at me to escape, I struggled to generate the momentum necessary to reverse positions. I would often fail.
This process of being pinned down, the epitome of failure as a wrestler, happened almost everyday in wrestling practice. For the first few months of my junior year, as a chubby kid, I would get slammed to the mat by stronger teammates. They— coaches or students — never laughed at me, but encouraged me to get back up, only to be dropped down once more. I quickly became intimate with this process of failure.
What I realized after months of being slammed and pinned, was that failure on the practice mat was integral to successful on the tournament mat. This realization made going to practice substantially more exciting. I would stare at the clock in my last class, and scramble down the stairwell, to be the first one in the locker room. I understood that the more time and effort I put into by sprawls and lifts, the better a wrestler I would be. Practice for me as a wrestler was (and is) the key to momentum.
Momentum needs to be distinguished from speed. In classical mechanic, speed refers to an object movement across a distance over time. Speed disregards the direction of the object’s movement. In contrast, momentum takes into account the objects direction and mass. These two elements are integral to our understanding of speed, momentum, and the use-value of failure.
Momentum’s inclusion of direction, as a factor, forces us to consider directional change in personal growth or achievement. When most people consider or think about growth, in their personal lives or work, they are thinking primarily speed, not momentum. They are measuring using change over time as a heuristic to assess whether they are progress.
In other words, a man (we’ll call him Dave) considers whether he has made X amount of money over the last year, instead of whether the direction of his personal finance growth is positive or negative, given his desired end goal. Put differently, an overweight woman (Susan) who worries about how many pounds or inches she has lost over time ignores direction as an important component. In the latter case, the direction of the her habitual changes in eating and exercise contributes far more to long-term health than changes on the scale. Our culture, though, makes it difficult to think in terms of direction, instead of just speed.
Speed itself does not warrant rejection. It is a good method to measure, but absent other components, it can skew our perception of progress, and limit our notion of possibility. The second component of momentum that warrants discussion is mass.
Mass refers to an object’s resistance to acceleration, or movement. We often think of mass simply as weight, but that misses its mechanical effect on objects around us. An object’s resistance to movement, or change, affects our perception of progress, because we often encounter objects with more mass, but do not acknowledge. Put differently, we face difficulties when attempting change (the direction of) high-mass objects (or situations) and feel despair. We feel despair, even disgust, because measure our ability to change the object or situation based on other objects or other situations.
For instance, Susan weighs 400 pounds and want to lost 200 pounds, with an injured leg. If she compares weight after 6 months (380 pounds) to her friend Jenna (who lost 40 pounds and now weighs 130 pounds) she will be disappointed. However, this dissapointment occurs because she is comparing her weight loss as a function of pounds lost over time, not in terms of direction of her life, or the massive change that she has succeded in making. You see, it was significantly harder for Susan to change her situation, with a broken leg, than Jenna, who was healthy and exercising for the last two years.
However, Susan’s psychological measurement mechanism obscures Jenna’s momentum, change in direction over time. More importantly, Susan’s use of speed as a measurement, ignores that Jenna’s failures and consistent work over the past two year had built up a reservoir of conserved momentum. Newton elucidated that momentum was conserved in an object, even when at a stopping, and could be transferred to other objects. The lesson here is that momentum grows over time and transfers to other activities. Put simply, changing an object or situation becomes easier over time—we learn from failures and successes, but failures especially.
If properly assessed, we can measure our growth based on the change in direction, and by assessing the time and effort it takes to change the object or situation. We can ask the following questions. Have I made progress in the forward direction over time? Precisely what progress have I made? How much time and effort, realistically, does it take to accomplish this task? Have I developed any momentum that will make it easier to make change in the future? How can I utilize the reservoir of momentum?
Failure is integral to success. Momentum, not speed, should be the measuring stick for change. If you are failing and frustated, you need to ask whether you are developing linear momentum, in the right direction. If you are not moving towards your goal, then you need to reverse course. If you are moving too slow, you may need to build up some more momentum—fail faster. If you find that your momentum (direction and change, given mass) is alright, then press on, confident that you will reach your goal. Put differently, developing momentum defines the goal.
