Do you guys know him by now? Here’s a piece of his most recent newsletter:
Once you see the momentum virus, you can’t unsee it. The momentum virus doesn’t just exist at the individual level. Society has them everywhere — you can see this clearly by removing the momentum away from legacy ideas.
Ask this question about legacy ideas: If this idea was introduced today — how would people react?
For example: If student loans didn’t exist — and somebody came up with the following idea:
Career loans targeting young people, where they enter life changing amounts of debt that they can never declare bankruptcy on, and decide at the age of 18 before their brain is fully developed without any career experience.
What would the reaction be if this idea didn’t exist today — and someone introduced it?
The idea would be immediately banned and the people running such a scheme would end up in prison.
If you want to judge the quality of a legacy idea, remove the momentum away. The legacy idea of student loans is accepted — because it’s accepted. Each year student loans got more insidious gradually — but the idea carries on because it has momentum.Max Planck once said: “Science advances one funeral at a time”
Applied to ‘Us’
Pretend Instagram isn’t a thing and a coach is describing for the first time his idea of how to make players better.
“We’ll skate them around obstacle courses of tires and cones, the players will perform each rep with their heads down keeping sole focus on not losing their puck. And we will video it all and convince people it makes you better in the game.”
Without the momentum of 1 million likes on the Internet, I hope… I hope most people would see this isn’t a great way to make a player better at hockey.
But with momentum, every Tom, Dick and Gene (okay, more like Brad, Chad and Alex) can post their obstacle courses on IG and be Influencer Coaches that set the game back a quarter century.
Let’s try out Force Coaching without the momentum of generations of perpetuating leadership mistakes…
“Okay, let’s yell at all the kids and point out every single mistake. Let’s make it so miserable that they don’t even want to come back. But the parents believe the same way to ‘coach’ as us so they’ll keep bringing their kids back until the kids have no other choice but to stop trying because they can’t tell their 45-year-old Dad to stop living through him and believing this outdated model of ‘leadership’. It hasn’t been fun for the longest time but that’s okay because this is what ‘coaching’ is.”
See how this momentum thing has really gotten us to a place we don’t want to be with ideas we don’t even want to use but continue to simply because ‘it’s how we’ve always done it.’
To end, I’ll repeat George’s question so you can think about it throughout the day:
Ask this question about legacy ideas: If this idea was introduced today — how would people react?