Most leaders treat momentum as something to chase — a resource that depletes when obstacles arrive and must be urgently replenished. The 9th-century Japanese poet Kūkai had a stranger, more useful idea: that what looks like interruption is often the form energy takes when it has nowhere obvious to go. In his esoteric Buddhist framework, obstacles weren't friction against forward motion — they were the motion, redirected. This maps unsettlingly well onto what psychologists call 'behavioral activation,' the finding that action precedes motivation rather than following it. Put together, the implication is concrete: on the days when drive has vanished and the path feels blocked, the correct move is not to wait for clarity or confidence to return, but to do something adjacent — a smaller, stranger, sideways version of the work. Not because it will feel better, but because Kūkai's logic says the energy is already moving; it just changed shape.

What are you currently treating as a full stop that might actually be a detour — and what is the smallest sideways move available to you right now?

Drawing from Shingon (Japanese Esoteric Buddhism) — Kūkai (Kōbō Daishi), Shōji, c. 830 CE, combined with behavioral activation research (Peter Lewinsohn, 1974)