15 Jan 2026 · 6 min
Steve Lichtman argues that momentum comes from stacking small, consistent actions rather than burning out on sprints. He cut his podcast from daily to twice weekly after overproducing in December drained his energy. Even imperfect forward motion beats stopping: pick one small task now and do it.
Hey guys, welcome to the show. Today, let's talk about stacking small wins, right? Building momentum and not crashing and burning by working yourself too hard, too strong, too fast, and too much. You know, momentum, it's not an endless sprint until you burn out. For me, momentum is all about stacking. Tiny, bold moves, so consistent that stopping actually feels like the wrong thing. Now, I'll, I'll tell you about an infomercial. It was in the '80s. I believe his name was Dan Lapree, something along those lines. I, I also believe that he went to jail and passed away, which is unfortunate. Even if he's a criminal, nobody wants anybody to ever have that fate, but Dan Lapree used to have ads on in the middle of the night when I was a kid. I would come home from my friend's houses and stay on the extra bedroom, hiding out, watching TV when everybody went to sleep, using the rabbit ears and watching wrestling from the NWA down south. Right. And, and in the commercials would be this guy afterwards when it ended every week, Dan Lapree. And he was placing tiny classified ads. And while that sounds kind of funny now, and you know, classified ads are kind of a thing of the past in this point of the society that we live in. Think about it for a minute. Yeah, he was a scam. Yeah, he went to jail. Yeah, he was a crook, whatever. But placing tiny classified ads was his premise to build wealth. Because if you placed all these tiny ads and each person sent you a dollar, then you sent the person that you got your ad from a dollar, and then they sent their ads to you that said, you, yeah, it was a pyramid scheme. And of course a pyramid scheme's wrong, but when you think about building momentum, it is a pyramid. You don't teeter it all on one post at the bottom and then build it upside down. You need to build a base, and the base is gonna be one piece of outreach, one post. One no, one workout at the gym for the new year with the Januarians. It's a, you know, one social media video, one YouTube, one TikTok, one LinkedIn. Stacking them daily is like stacking amps on a stage. Who's gonna have larger reach at the end of the day? The person that's a part-time barista playing their acoustic guitar on a tiny amp at a coffee house, or AC/DC and their wall of amplifiers at every arena and stadium in which they go and just rock out. And we've all been thunderstruck now and again. For me, yeah, I look at it like if I feel the dip coming, if I feel like there's a lag, and look, sometimes there is a lag. You know, there we all hit that point. Sometimes we overwork ourselves too much and we don't have the right pace. Because if you overwork yourself and you don't have the right pace, you can't build momentum. I struggled with that in December, overworking myself trying to do this show every day when the reality was between the show, the light editing, the prepping it, the getting it onto the platform and, and filling out all the stuff for each episode, it became. An extra, an extra step every day that I was doing that I didn't have time for at that time. Will I increase the, the, the amount of posts of these every week? Maybe down the road. For now, 2 a week is going to be where it's going to be. Maybe by April we'll move to 3 a week or something like that. But it's about that momentum and keeping moving forward. So even when I felt that dip, I just grabbed the smallest thing I could do to keep the chains moving forward, which was changing my cadence of delivery. And I kept moving forward. I wouldn't stop. It's just about never quitting, right? Even if you're not 100% on it, even if you think it needs a little more work, it's worse to pull the e-brake and stop than it is to just keep cruising and working it out as you go. So make those small changes in your day. Find those little wins that you could stack. So when you look at the end of the week, you go, well, instead of failing on 90 big projects I never had the time to do, this week, or, you know, it could be 12 big things you wanted to do this week, or 5 big things you wanted to do this week, or 1 big thing you wanted to do this week, but you didn't do it. Instead, if you knock out 3 or 4 small things that only take a couple minutes each, the next thing you know, you're rocking and rolling and you're building fantastic momentum. So I didn't have a riff in the last show. I had screwed that up, but you know, at the end of the day, I kind of hit it anyway. I hit where I wanted to hit with it that, you know, the robots and the AI world's writing words and humans, we dropped the humans in pipe pumps. Maybe I did do a riff now that I think, I might have talked myself out of that, but either way, today's riff is really simple. Motion cures stagnation. So always keep the chains moving. And keep it alive. So your action from this episode's simple. I want you to pick one small, bold thing right now. Say it to yourself out loud in your car, on the train, or wherever. Type it to yourself, whatever you have to do to own this and own this moment. Message that prospect, share that idea, make that social media post right now after this. Feel the groove build and start stacking those first wins. Outlast people that sprint because steady is gonna win this tour for you every single time. And with that, I'm Steve Lichtman. This was Unfiltered and Unshakeable. Thank you so much for being here and have an awesome day.
