The rhythm of daily action aligned with your goals creates the momentum that separates dreamers from super‐achievers.

—Darren Hardy

Ever have one of those days where you feel completely unstoppable?

We've all had them at one point or another—a day you seem to rack up win after win after win, and nothing is slowing you down. It's a beautiful feeling, isn't it? Each success seems to fuel the next one, and before you know it, you have an unrestrainable momentum that takes on a life all its own.

In football, and sports in general, we strive for that kind of momentum, and we recognize that feeling on the field when it happens. It's not any single moment—it's when one team is successful in several events in a row, which leads the crowd and team to believe that more winning events are about to occur.

Just like in football, our life momentum comes from a series of events stacked on top of each other over time. When you start racking up wins through your consistent morning routine, you inevitably build positive momentum in your life. That routine you devised sets you up for success and is a promise you keep to yourself.

The momentum from all those actions will build in your life. Practiced long enough, you'll hit the “hockey stick effect”—a term often used in finance to record results over a long period. They call it a hockey stick because, on a graph, it looks flat for a long time, and then results rise dramatically in a very short time, creating the shape of a hockey stick. Remember in Chapter 7 I talked about how little micro‐actions build up cumulatively over time? It's that effect measured, a phenomenon discussed in Jeff Olson's The Slight Edge and many other books on self‐development. Your little wins will keep building over time until you break out with incredible results. Some success stories reflect the hockey stick effect in a short time, and others are years in the making.

However, there is a vital ingredient to maximize the potential of each win, no matter how big or small. First, you must record and recognize the win so that you can add it into your collective energy and the greater momentum of your life. And for you to do that, you'll have to start recognizing wins in your day‐to‐day life.

How Small Wins Add to Your Momentum

So, what is a “win”?

A win is an accomplishment with a beginning, a middle, and an end, and you feel good about it. It doesn't matter how big or small it is. It is an accomplishment that makes you feel better about yourself or makes you progress toward a stated goal, even if just a little bit. A little win can be an incremental step toward a larger win. Brushing your teeth can be a win. So can getting a huge promotion or being triumphant at the Super Bowl. It could be one piano practice or a successful recital. It can be one workout, or it could be losing 30 pounds over six months.

You are producing wins every day, and you might not even know it if you don't record or notice what's happening! For example, did you pay the bills? Did you go to work? Did you get some exercise? All wins!

You're losing out on enormous potential if you don't stop and measure your wins as progress in the overall goals of your life. Moreover, you're robbing yourself of momentum and joy that can get you there faster and be exciting and fun along the way.

If you take stock of your wins every day and see what you are accomplishing, your entire mindset will change. That's part of why I feel the morning routine is so crucial for your long‐term and short‐term success. And when you get to the end of the day, writing down all the wins and remembering all the things you are grateful for can give you a meaningful boost.

We all have rough days. It's easy to forget all the good you did throughout the day that aligns with your purpose, vision, and mission statement.

Start recording wins day by day as little positive markers, and your outlook on life will start to change.

It's funny; I didn't recognize the power of starting your day with wins until they were suddenly absent from my life. Only then did I have to get intentional about creating my own system and recording the wins as I went along.

Building Confidence Through Wins

The importance of recording your daily wins is something that high‐performance people have recognized for years, especially in sports. I had the privilege of hosting Dr. Jason Selk on my podcast, a world‐class coach and one of the top performance coaches in the United States. He's also a prolific author who shares many of his winning techniques in his books. Dr. Selk's specialty is mental toughness, which is of particular interest to people in athletics and the business world.

On my show, Dr. Selk had a fascinating perspective on why recording your wins are so essential for his brand of mental toughness. He said that whenever someone works with him, whether it's an athlete or an executive, this is where he starts—the foundation of his work:

I agree. We need that self‐encouragement to build our confidence. And if we're not actively recording those wins every day, then we're simply building discouragement and actively deflating momentum. If you're not encouraging yourself, you're discouraging yourself, and that's horrible for your confidence and long‐term self‐esteem:

If we're not in the habit of encouraging ourselves with wins, we are likely beating ourselves up unnecessarily. It's okay to recognize areas where we need to improve, but there's no honor or benefit from ignoring all the things we did well to fixate on that error or mistake. Dr. Selk insists that we start with what we did well and physically write three things down. By doing that, he says,

If you stick to this plan and take stock of everything you're doing well, your confidence will grow immeasurably. As Dr. Selk points out, “Focus on what you do well, and you'll do more of it well.”

Some of the world's top performers take this advice. You can make it work wonders for you, too.

How Morning Wins Can Help You Mitigate Small Setbacks

By going through the powerful morning routine that you have created, you're stacking wins to start the day. You're putting yourself in a mindset to attack the day and be successful throughout the rest of your waking hours. You'll start out with more patience based on a little bit of quiet time. You're not rushing into things, not starting your morning in a reactive state.

You're essentially leaving nothing on the table. You're preparing for this day the best and most complete way you can. If something goes wrong, it's not because you didn't prepare properly or weren't in the right state of mind. One way I like to think about it is that if I didn't do everything I could to prepare for a football game correctly, and we ended up losing the game, I would feel terrible. But if I knew in my heart that I prepared as hard as I could, then I could live with the loss. That's just football.

Similarly, when you prepare properly in ordinary life, and things still don't go your way, you can live at peace with it. You have done everything you could, and tomorrow is another day. I think that's a great analogy for life in general. If you're setting yourself up for success through your preparation and you're doing everything you can, that's all you can do.

It's essential to be kind to yourself and not beat yourself up too much when things go wrong, especially things that are out of your control.

I had Merril Hodge, a former professional football player and now an analyst for ESPN, on my podcast. He had a great story about not judging others or yourself too harshly. Merril said that he feels like he's a great little league football coach because he evaluates the kids based only on the “yardstick of their life.” That was the term he used because if you try to treat a six‐ or seven‐year‐old on a football field the same way you do a college player, you're just expecting too much of them. However, if you're judging them based only on the point of life they are in presently, it becomes a lot easier.

Similarly, you can't judge yourself or expect too much of yourself when you did everything you could to prepare for the day properly. Sometimes, you'll have minor setbacks, and you can't take them personally. Just remember to apologize when necessary and check your pride at the door.

Remembering Big Wins Can Get You Through Significant Setbacks

Of course, some days, you have a more significant than usual setback, one that can send you reeling off course or spiraling into a dark place. I'm not talking about losing your temper or being late to work. I mean terrible things, like losing your job, having a horrendous personal injury, or getting awful news from a friend or relative. Those are the days you have to pull out the big guns and remind yourself of times you conquered similar adversity.

Adversity can be such a tremendous gift. It makes us dig in and show ourselves what we are made of to conquer it. But, of course, the conquer part of it, the persevering through challenging circumstances, is the win. So when you see adversity again, it's no stranger to you. You'll know what you have to do because you've already done it in the past. That's why it's vital to remember the challenging things you've already been through—that you are strong, and this won't be the first big obstacle or the last that you must defeat.

Gaining Momentum from Wins Requires Accountability

Back in the days at the Bills' training facility, we would often go over the footage of our team's performance to determine how we could improve. The game tape was excellent—the camera doesn't lie. If my foot was in the wrong place, we didn't run the play according to the assignment, or we didn't communicate as a team, it was all up there on the tape. It always told the truth, and we could extract multiple wins from improving our performance from there. Having such a black‐and‐white metric was fantastic. Not repeating mistakes you have made is one of the greatest momentum builders and should be a constant focus in your life.

I don't have that game tape anymore to evaluate the metrics of my life, so I have to develop my own. Those little data points help me gain momentum from one week to the next.

One of the greatest allies I have in that arena is my personal executive coach, Mac. I tell Mac my goals, mission statement, what I want to be in life, and the things that I feel are obstacles in my way. When you are that honest, you almost force yourself into a certain standard. Mac helps me to hold myself accountable to my high standards. There's no avoiding it now; I put it out in the open! I know he's going to ask me whether I completed the task that I gave myself last week and all the other things that I know I need to be held accountable for.

That's why telling other people your goals can be a great thing—another tool to keep yourself accountable. For example, if a friend of mine knows I'm trying to lose weight, and he sees me eating a bunch of junk, he might stop me and ask, “Hey, Eric, what the heck are you doing? This isn't matching what you said you wanted.” But, of course, if I had never said anything about my weight, then he probably wouldn't bring it up. And that's the point—people holding you accountable are your allies and will help you stack up the bigger wins you are shooting for.

One of my favorite quotes is from former college football player and current motivational speaker Inky Johnson, who tragically lost motor function in one of his arms after a hit that occurred in a football game, “Commitment is staying true to what you said you were going to do long after the mood that you said it in has left.” It's human nature to stray off the course of our goals and vision, but having others who know what you're striving for can be a powerful force to keep you on your path to success.

Mac gave me a great tool to help me measure how I'm doing with my wife every week. He told me to ask her how I was doing as a husband every week on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being the highest). Leslie would give me the number and sometimes an explanation of why she scored it that way. Then, my job was to make no excuses, try not to take it personally if it was low, and make my best efforts to work on raising it or keeping it high for the next week. That competitive nature makes me want to keep that score high, and all the competitive ones out there reading this love a scoreboard!

Plus, of course, I love Leslie, and I want to keep her happy and our relationship solid. So sometimes, if it's in the middle of the week, if I feel that maybe I'm not doing so well with her, I'll send her a text and say, “Hey, how are things going?” That check‐in can go a long way and enables me to improve if needed.

Bottom line, if you want to improve your short‐term and long‐term life to help accumulate even more wins, you have to be honest about your present performance. You'll have to develop a system to get some kind of regular accountability.

Boundaries and Systems: Built‐In Accountability for Wins

Some things are so ingrained in me that they become hard and fast rules or permanent systems. They are rules I will never break. Some of them relate to my core values and mission statement or my non‐negotiables. Others relate to my short‐ and long‐term goals, like maintaining a healthy weight. Some of them are just healthy habits I've formed as part of my morning routine.

Every time you choose to follow your built‐in system or boundary is a win! You are aligning yourself in real time with the path for success that you have worked so hard on. It's staying on that freeway to your goals, rather than going off‐roading and getting stuck and not knowing how to get out.

Any psychologist will tell you that it's an integral part of mental health to have definitive boundaries and to know there are certain lines you will just not cross. A friend I admire named Junior Bridgeman recently had a great expression about this.

Junior Bridgeman is an incredible guy. We play golf often, and I've hosted him on my podcast. Junior is an enormously successful businessman and former NBA player. He's the second‐richest NBA player in the world behind Michael Jordan, except he earned most of that money from a restaurant empire, not his NBA career earnings. He has one of the best reputations, if not the best reputation, of anyone I've met in my entire life.

I asked Junior, “How have you been able to keep such an impeccable reputation your whole life where no one says anything bad about you?” I thought that inevitably, someone has got to have a bad experience with him, even if it may not have been his fault.

“I just have guardrails in my life,” Junior replied, “and I never go outside those.”

That answer blew me away because I couldn't believe the simplicity of it. I thought it was great advice, and I joked that maybe my guardrails were a little wider than his.

Guard rails are essentially the same as systems and boundaries to keep you on track. They can do wonders in cutting down on decision fatigue. If your system is strong enough, there won't be a decision to make at all! It would just be automatic behavior based on the rules you set for yourself.

That automatic, correct behavior helps me cut down on decision fatigue. For example, if I'm on an established system where I control my eating in a certain way, I don't have to worry about what I will eat tomorrow. I have already purchased the healthy food I want to eat, and the unhealthy food won't even be in my house. I don't have to worry about when I'm going to get up because I have my routine and alarm all set. And because I like to set up my next day the night before, I even have my clothes picked out.

The more I can have automatic guard rails in my life, the better. My mind races constantly, so anything that can stop me from a rabbit hole of indecision is excellent. I can put my systems on autopilot and let them take care of the small things.

At this point, my morning routine is part of that autopilot, and that's a great thing because that's the first of three essential ingredients to maintaining unstoppable momentum.

Maintaining Unstoppable Momentum Part 1: Daily Process

Once your daily process is set, and you've acquired the habit of doing it every day, you have created the foundation for building momentum. You're doing all the micro‐actions necessary throughout the day and stacking wins on top of each other. You are also imperceptibly improving every day. You may not notice it at the moment, but over time it becomes undeniable.

Remember the hockey stick effect mentioned in Chapter 7? Where the measurement of your results looks flat for an extended period of time and then rises dramatically in a very short time? A parallel analogy for that dramatic rise is compound interest. In this comparison, we'll talk about percentage increases in improvement rather than money. So, if you get 1% better every day, you might think you are 365% better than at the start of the year, or roughly just over 3½ times more improved. That's great!

But that's not the actual number. The way compounding interest works is that you're 1% better than the day before, so you're actually 1% better than that new improved you that was 1% better than the day before that—and so on. So you're constantly improving by 1% something that was already improved. By the end of the year, you're actually 37 times more improved than your original baseline at the start!

That's the power of incremental improvement and stacking small wins every day. You will feel the little victories in the short term and big wins in the long term.

Relentless forward momentum doesn't have to be dramatic—every day doesn't have to light the world on fire! It can be just getting those little wins in the morning every day. So you keep moving forward, little by little.

My head coach when I got to the University of Louisville was Bobby Petrino. He said that in life, and in football, whatever you're doing, you're either getting better or getting worse. There's no gray area. So for people who are serious about getting further in life, there's no “I don't need to move forward today.” You're not going to say, “I'll just stay where I am.” That's not how things work. You're either moving in one direction or the other.

Every day doesn't have to be an absolute home run or swing for the fences because you'll probably crash and burn with that mentality. It's the little wins in the morning and throughout the day and then keeping track of those at night that allows you the peace of knowing that you're at least growing.

To bring it back to how momentum works in football, all the players are coming into the game field‐ready from their daily routine over the last year. At the very minimum, they come in prepared and ready to go. Their daily process was never a question; it's what got them there and long predated running out of the tunnel at the start of the game. When you're watching a football game, the game doesn't actually start that day. The players began the game months and years ago at the beginning of their physical training journeys.

When they do come running out of that tunnel, they have already started to feel the second vital part of maintaining momentum—the roaring support of their fans.

Maintaining Unstoppable Momentum Part 2: Support System

One of the greatest joys and rushes from playing football is the support from the fans. There are so many times in a football game when our home fans gave us incredible support in critical moments. It is noticeably easier for the home team to feel and maintain their momentum because a gigantic crowd shouts their lungs out behind them. When you score a touchdown, and the crowd starts roaring, that momentum is tangible. It's one of the most incredible feelings in sports.

Conversely, the opposing team, when they feel that energy against them, might think, “We're in trouble now.” They're going to be listening to the crowd and think it's going to be harder to build a successful offensive series because of the energy and that they won't even be able to hear each other out on the field. There's a pronounced momentum shift.

Similar to being out on the field in a game, you have a home team advantage when you have a support system in your corner and rooting you on. If you have a healthy support system in life, the right people supporting you along your journey, they will assist you immeasurably. If you have friends and family that genuinely want you to have success in life, they can help you build that momentum.

Professional athletes recently got a keen sense of the impact crowd energy has while playing during the pandemic. There were no crowds in NFL stadiums during the pandemic. I've heard firsthand from players how difficult it was to build and feel the momentum, even when doing well.

Remember how I mentioned that your friends sometimes have a better idea of your gifts than you do? The same goes for your wins. To you, it may have just been another day at the office. Your friends might see something entirely different: a responsible, capable superstar who handles themselves with confidence and grace. Often your support system might recognize small wins that you might not be fully celebrating or notice at all.

You can cultivate your home team advantage by selecting and leaning into your support system. I would encourage people to surround themselves with people who spur them on in their big and little moments. If you have that crowd celebrating with you, you're going to feel more momentum in your life. That could be from an executive coach, a life coach you hire, a spouse, your children, your buddies, mentors, teachers—it can come from all kinds of different places.

Your support system is your home team advantage when it comes to momentum. So make sure you explore it, use it, and appreciate it!

Maintaining Unstoppable Momentum Part 3: Removing Distractions

Sometimes you have to add things to your life to help maintain or build your momentum. And sometimes, you have to subtract. One of the most important things that you can remove are distractions—useless wastes of time that get in the way of your goal. And in today's society, distractions are everywhere, coming at us from all directions.

If you don't limit distractions in your life, you may not even notice the momentum you already have, or worse, you can lose momentum, or you may not be able to create it. Those distractions can be internal or external, each of which produces a distinct challenge to overcome.

You can manage your distractions with a dedicated commitment to your morning routine. Those moments of silence and intentionally designing your day can go a long way in reminding you what you are doing, why you are here, and what you have set out to achieve today. In addition, I always find it grounding when I repeat the question I started the day with: “What good am I going to do today?”

Another great thing to manage internal distractions is to do your best to remain in the moment. No good can come from fixating on something that went wrong two minutes ago. If you were on a sailboat, I'd say that wind has already shifted. The wind from two minutes ago is gone. So adjust your sails accordingly.

External distractions in your own life present their unique maddening challenges. Getting a healthier relationship with your electronic devices is a great start.

Temptations in the form of food, a night out with friends, your favorite tv show, or even beautiful weather can throw you off track of what you are trying to do that day. So, return to your core values, mission, and how you decided your day was going to go today. Do you want to capitalize on your momentum, or do you want to derail yourself?

Certainly, we all know that certain distractions are unavoidable and an unfortunate fact of life. If someone you love is in bad shape, or you had a recent loss, or you are suffering some kind of injury or illness or abuse—those are life conditions that you have to deal with emotionally. There are beautiful distractions that are unavoidable, too—such as the birth of a new child or great news from your family. Make sure you give yourself space to deal with all of that—it's just part of life.

There's one more distraction that I would classify as internal and is insidious and tough to deal with. It's that inner voice that says you should quit when things get difficult. It's wanting to take the easy way out when you feel challenged outside your comfort zone. The internal voice sets up an internal battle inside yourself between two powerful forces—your standards versus your feelings.

Standards over Feelings

My friend Ben Newman, a renowned performance coach, global speaker, and bestselling author, said on my recent podcast that one of his secrets to success and forward momentum was executing “standards over feelings.”

What he means is that if you let your feelings dictate how you operate, then you're always going to come up short because your feelings will derail you from the awkwardness of stretching outside your comfort zone to return to more safe or familiar circumstances. For example, if you are on a weight loss journey, you will feel hungry and feel like eating. If you are training to increase your stamina while running, that first mile outside your former limit will seem strange and difficult. Your feelings will want you to stop.

In the football season, there were days when I felt tired, achy, or worn out. I sometimes felt that it would be another monotonous day, and I just didn't want to push any further. But I didn't surrender to that feeling because I had a high standard.

Plus, your body likes to trick you into thinking it's exhausted when you still have much more strength and stamina left over in the tank. David Goggins, an ultramarathon runner and a former Navy SEAL, has some illuminating opinions of the body's limits. He said that in Navy SEAL training, when your body wants to quit, and when your mind and feelings tell you to quit, you're essentially only at about 40% of your capacity. You still have 60% left.

My buddy David Nurse says it takes about 17 seconds of discomfort to get used to something, and he uses a cold shower as an example. He also brings this up when he's training with NBA players. He'll say, “I know you're sore today, but just let's start this drill.” And David says it usually takes about 17 seconds for them to get used to it. However, it could be anything, not just athletics. It could be the 17 seconds of discomfort you get from the heat of a sauna. Or it could be putting in a demanding workday. It could be sitting down to write a book! You just have to get through those first 17 seconds.

Whatever your unmotivated or uncomfortable moment might be, if you can get yourself past your feelings and push through, there is so much growth that can come from that, and that's amazing. You'll get more momentum if you work through these occasional bouts of discomfort. It's just part of the game.

Don't Let Positive Momentum Seduce You (Keep Doing the Thing!)

It was easy to get seduced by the positive momentum of the active season in football and let up a little on the off‐season. But if you're a professional player, you have to keep your level of conditioning high and your strength high even during the months of the year that you're not playing. I always say that it's easier to stay ready than to get ready. During the season, the game may be getting easier for you because you are in the flow of things, but it's still vitally important you focus on getting better each day; you have to be careful not to plateau and think, “I've got this.” Throughout the season, you should be improving and your techniques should be advancing.

Then the football season ends, which can be a giant momentum killer for your body. If you weren't plateauing before, here's when you might end up losing your momentum if you're not intentional about it. If you stick with your training and everything else during the off‐season, hopefully, you can lock in where you are at. But I've seen so many guys go the opposite direction and completely kill their momentum. If you self‐sabotage yourself, don't train in the off‐season, or don't mentally prepare and actively seek ways to improve your craft, you're possibly going to be in worse shape than where you started the year before. Because, guess what? All the guys you are competing against are getting better, too!

The same lesson is applicable outside of athletics. If you build momentum, make this big sale, or complete this challenging project, you can be seduced by your own success and let your foot off the gas pedal a little bit. Maybe you take too much time off. Or you stop doing all your sales calls and aren't doing your homework correctly. Well, if you sit back and rest on your recent success, stop doing the daily things that got you there in the first place, and stop stacking those wins, you may find yourself going backward. You can lose all that momentum again. That's not the trajectory you want to be on.

Overcoming Negative Momentum

What happens when you start to feel momentum going in the wrong direction? Getting derailed might take you off your routine and your wins for a couple of days, which could turn into weeks and months. Or perhaps you became seduced by your success and got a little sloppy with your routine. Then, suddenly, you might find yourself going in the wrong direction fast.

The first thing I would recommend is not to beat yourself up and just get back on the routine as soon as possible. I've seen this a lot with people on their weight loss journeys. Maybe they had terrific momentum and just lost 15 pounds, then they break their routine over one weekend and gain back five practically overnight. Sometimes there's discouragement there or thought that all this effort wasn't worth it. Perhaps they feel like they're not getting quick‐enough results, or maybe they're beating themselves up about feeling like a failure.

Again, be kind to yourself. Sometimes there are setbacks, but it doesn't mean you can't get back on the wagon. Forgive yourself, think about strategies to prevent the same kind of backsliding from happening again, and move on. Expect to have a little discomfort getting back to where you were and just keep going.

For example, no matter how much I trained, I sometimes felt like I had backslid during the off‐season. The first place I would feel the sorest was my neck, which is typical for many players. Generally, when you start a training camp, your neck will be sore. It's from holding this heavy helmet on that your body has to be accustomed to again. You're taking shots to the head and your neck all the time as an offensive lineman, so you have to train to get used to it again. That's part of the reason why you see football players walking around with these big traps and thick necks.

You also have to train your neck in the off‐season to be able to withstand that. You don't quit over a sore neck, just like you don't stop if you have a setback. Instead, just like regaining neck strength, you'll build up your skill level again and return to your peak capability.

Growing Your Confidence and Process Goals

The other thing I have to remind myself of is that following my daily routine, in and of itself, is a win. It's what's known as a process goal. Dr. Selk and I talked about that when I hosted him on my podcast. He said the second key ingredient to building your confidence is focusing on process goals.

So what is a process goal? Process goals are very well known in the sports world among coaches. To define them, it helps to compare process goals against product goals, otherwise known as results. As Dr. Selk pointed out, a product goal can be something like winning the Super Bowl or earning $100,000 this year. There's nothing wrong with having a product goal. They are highly motivating.

Process goals, however, are daily activities that help you fulfill your product goals. Dr. Selk defines a process goal as “What is the single most important activity that will cause the result you are looking for?” For instance, for his Super Bowl example, Dr. Selk suggests it might be at the very least making 100% of the practices. For the $100,000 example, it might be focusing on seven key sales calls every single day.

Once again, it all comes back to the daily routine. That's where your process lives. And as Dr. Selk points out: “If you focus on the process, you have control of the result.”

Looking Back at How Far You've Come

Your routine, your process goals, and your wins will continue to sharpen your sword in all areas of life, build momentum, and ultimately help you become the person you want to be. As you grow, don't be surprised that certain things will start to change. When you gain one thing in life, you lose another. The reverse is also true—when you lose one thing in life, you also gain another.

Applied to your life, adding your new daily routine means you will likely lose activities you were doing at that time—subtracting things that weren't intentional. And as you become proficient in your new daily routine and gain momentum, you'll find new activities that will enhance your journey and lead toward exciting growth. All this intentionality will inevitably lead to a noticeable change in your life.

Change isn't always easy. As you become successful, some people might see a negative connotation concerning improvements in your life, such as a new relationship or accumulating wealth. It's completely normal to change—it's unhealthy not to! If you haven't seen someone in five years, and they're the same person they were then, it doesn't reflect well on them. I think it would benefit all people to be super‐learners, avid acquirers of new knowledge until the Lord calls you home.

You should be changing continually, building on your momentum, and constantly enhancing yourself as a work in progress.

Key Takeaways

Here are the key takeaways about starting your day with wins and building momentum:

• Stacking and recording small wins add to your momentum.
• You can build your confidence with small wins.
• Small wins are little accomplishments with a beginning, middle, and end.
• Wins can help you mitigate small and significant setbacks.
• Gaining momentum from wins requires accountability.
• Boundaries and systems create built‐in accountability for wins.
• The first key ingredient to maintaining your momentum is sticking to your daily routine.
• The second key ingredient to maintaining your momentum is a strong support system.
• The third key ingredient to maintaining your momentum is eliminating distractions.
• It's crucial to uphold standards over feelings when struggling with discomfort.
• Don't let positive momentum seduce you into falling out of your routine.
• Forgive yourself any setbacks from negative momentum, and get back into your routine.
• Keep growing your confidence with process goals—if you control the process, you control the result.
• Adding one thing into your life sometimes means subtracting another and vice versa.
• Take stock of how much you've grown and how far you've come in your journey.