Fifth Monday of the Year.

This Week: Time Is Momentum

The 2026 Super Bowl is this Sunday—February 8—and the matchup is set. Patriots versus Seahawks. Championship rematch. High stakes. National stage. But there's a different Super Bowl worth talking about first. One that wasn't supposed to be a game at all. One where a team down 28-3 in the third quarter—with a 0.4% chance of winning—came all the way back. And the reason they came back has a name. It's called momentum.

But before we get to that story—and another one, from NASA, that's even more striking—let's talk about what momentum actually means. Because most people use the word without thinking about what it really is. And once you understand it, you start to see it everywhere.

Time Is Money. No. Time Is Momentum.

People say "time is money." It's one of the most repeated phrases in business. It's printed on motivational posters. It's cited in pitch decks. It's used to justify urgency, efficiency, and speed. And it's wrong. Or at least, it's incomplete.

Money is an output. It's the result. It's what shows up after the work is done, after the value is created, after the system delivers. You don't start with money. You end with it. Money is the outcome of a process. But momentum? Momentum is the input. It's the force that compounds effort into results. It's what turns clarity into execution, ideas into systems, intention into impact.

If your goal is income—revenue, growth, financial return—and impact—serving your community, delivering value, building something that matters—then the question isn't "how do I make more money?" The question is "how do I build more momentum?" Because momentum is the force that gets you there. And once you have it, outcomes that seemed impossible start to feel inevitable.

Momentum Is the Most Consistent Ingredient

Look at the most successful endeavors. The most successful people. The most successful projects. Define success however you want: high impact, high income, lasting influence, real change. The most consistent ingredient—maybe the most consistent ingredient—across all of them is momentum.

Not talent. Talented people stall every single day. Not funding. Well-funded projects fail constantly. Not timing. Good timing without momentum is just a missed window. Not vision. Visionaries without execution are just dreamers. The thing that shows up again and again, in every success story, is momentum. Sustained force in one direction. Consistent effort compounding over time.

And if you don't believe that, consider the following two stories—one from football, one from physics—that prove it.

The Greatest Comeback in Super Bowl History

Down 28-3 late in the third quarter, ESPN's real-time win probability model gave the Patriots a 0.4% chance of winning. That's not a typo. Zero point four percent. The Falcons had a 99.6% probability of victory. Those are lottery-ticket odds. But the Patriots didn't see it that way.

Tom Brady threw a touchdown to Danny Amendola with 5:56 left in the third quarter. 28-9. Then James White scored. 28-12. Then a two-point conversion. 28-14. The Falcons were still up by two touchdowns. Still in control. But something had changed. The momentum had shifted.

Julian Edelman's impossible catch — Photo: Sports Illustrated

Julian Edelman made an impossible catch—off a deflection, inches from the ground, surrounded by three Falcons defenders. That kept a drive alive. The Patriots scored again. 28-20. Then the Falcons, trying to put the game away, committed a holding penalty that took them out of field goal range. They had to punt. The Patriots drove down the field and tied the game with 57 seconds left in regulation. 28-28. The first Super Bowl to ever go to overtime.

The Patriots won the coin toss. They marched down the field. James White scored on a two-yard run. Game over. Final score: Patriots 34, Falcons 28. The largest comeback in Super Bowl history. Thirty-one unanswered points. A 25-point deficit erased. And the most remarkable thing wasn't any single play—it was the sequence. One play after another. One conversion after another. A relentless, compounding series of small victories that, together, became unstoppable.

Tom Brady said afterward: "We all brought each other back... We never felt out of it." Bill Belichick's philosophy—Do Your Job—wasn't about the scoreboard. It was about the next play. Not the deficit. Not the odds. Just the next play. And when you execute the next play, and then the next one, and then the next one, momentum builds. And once momentum shifts, outcomes that seemed impossible start to feel inevitable.

But What Is Momentum, Really?

Everyone uses the word momentum. Sports announcers. Business consultants. Motivational speakers. "We need to build momentum." "They've got all the momentum now." "We're losing momentum." But momentum isn't a metaphor. It's not a feeling. It's physics. Real, measurable, quantifiable physics.

Momentum is mass times velocity: p = mv. It's a vector quantity, which means it has both magnitude and direction. A freight train moving at 60 mph has massive momentum. A bullet has high velocity but low mass—still significant momentum because of the speed. But here's what most people don't know: Newton's original formulation of his Second Law wasn't F = ma (force equals mass times acceleration). It was about momentum. F = Δp/Δt. Force equals the rate of change of momentum.

And from that, we get the Impulse-Momentum Theorem: F⋅Δt = Δp. Force times time equals change in momentum. That equation is the key to everything. Because it tells you that the same change in momentum can happen in two very different ways:

The Dawn Spacecraft: A Case Study in Tiny Forces

In September 2007, NASA launched a spacecraft called Dawn. The mission objective was unprecedented: orbit two different celestial bodies in a single mission. First, the asteroid Vesta. Then, the dwarf planet Ceres. No spacecraft had ever done that. Rockets use massive amounts of fuel to change orbits—fuel that weighs too much to carry for multiple destinations. So NASA tried something different.

They equipped Dawn with an ion propulsion system. Not a chemical rocket. An electric engine that ionizes xenon gas and accelerates the ions out the back to produce thrust. And here's the thing about ion engines: they produce almost no force. Dawn's engine generated 0.09 Newtons of thrust. For context, that's less force than the weight of a single sheet of printer paper resting in your hand. If you held that engine while it was running, you wouldn't feel it. It's that weak.

But NASA didn't run it for a few minutes. They ran it for 2,100 days. Nearly six years. Continuously. A tiny, imperceptible force, applied without stopping, day after day after day. And over that time, Dawn achieved something extraordinary: a total velocity change (what aerospace engineers call "delta-v") of 11.5 kilometers per second. That's more than any spacecraft had ever achieved through its own propulsion system. More than the Apollo missions. More than the Space Shuttle. More than anything.

Dawn orbited Vesta for 14 months, mapped its surface, gathered data, and then—using that same tiny engine—broke orbit, traveled across the asteroid belt, and entered orbit around Ceres. It completed its mission in 2018 after 11 years of operation. The mission was considered impossible before it launched. But it worked. Not because of brute force. Because of consistency. A force weaker than a piece of paper, applied for 2,100 days, accomplished what no amount of short-burst chemical propulsion could replicate.

That's the Impulse-Momentum Theorem in action. F⋅Δt = Δp. Tiny force multiplied by enormous time equals massive change in momentum. And once that momentum is built, it carries the spacecraft across the solar system.

The Super Bowl is this Sunday. Momentum will decide it—the same way it always does. Not talent alone. Not strategy alone. Momentum. The team that builds it, sustains it, and refuses to let it slip will win.

In physics, momentum is conserved. It doesn't disappear. It transfers. It compounds. It builds. The same is true in your work. Every day you show up and apply force in one direction—no matter how small that force is—you're building something. Not just progress. Momentum. And momentum, once built, is very hard to stop.

Time isn't money. Time is momentum. And momentum is where everything starts.

Sources

• ESPN: Super Bowl LI win probability data (ESPN Analytics, February 5, 2017)

• NFL.com: Super Bowl LI official game recap

• Sports Illustrated: "Super Bowl 51: Julian Edelman Miracle Catch" (si.com, February 6, 2017)

• NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Dawn Mission documentation (jpl.nasa.gov/missions/dawn)

• NASA: Ion Propulsion overview (nasa.gov/centers/glenn/about/fs21grc.html)

• Newton, Isaac: Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) — momentum formulation of Second Law