Velocity sits at the heart of physics. Energy, force, acceleration, momentum—all of it traces back to velocity. You learned it in school, probably forgot it after the exam.

But velocity matters just as much for companies, organisations, and individual lives.

It's one of the most important factors in determining whether you actually build something meaningful and succeed, or stay stuck with ideas that never become a reality.

And somehow, it's one of the most understated forces in business and life.

Speed ≠ Velocity

One of the first things we learn in physics is that speed and velocity aren't the same thing.

Speed is how fast you're going.

Velocity is how fast you're going in a specific direction. In physics, we call this a vector.

The difference matters because life, like physics, doesn't care about effort. It cares about displacement. What matters is where we end up and the value we create, not how much energy we burned along the way. This seems obvious. But something keeps stopping us from building velocity...

Equilibrium is Death

37°C. That's our body temperature.

-270°C. That's the universe's natural state.

We're literally fighting thermodynamic death with every heartbeat. Our cells constantly burn energy to maintain that difference. The moment we stop? We equilibrate. We're dead.

Richard Dawkins wrote in The Blind Watchmaker:

"Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. If living things didn't work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die."

While this passage wasn't intended as a metaphor, it's a powerful one. And this phenomenon exists at every scale of our universe.

At the smallest scale, an ant fights to maintain order. It regulates water in its cells against the dry air. It repairs damage to its body. It forages for energy. Stop any of this work, and decay wins. The ant disintegrates back into the earth.

At the largest scale, a star burns fuel through nuclear fusion, creating outward pressure that fights gravity's inward crush. When the fuel runs out, gravity wins. The star collapses and cools—becoming a white dwarf, neutron star, or black hole. The work stops, the star dies.

The same law applies at every scale, including our lives and what we're building.

Jeff Bezos wrote in his final letter as Amazon's CEO:

"We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable. We are all taught to 'be yourself.' What I'm really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don't let it happen."

He's right. Staying different isn't something we achieve once and keep forever. The world constantly pulls us toward normal, toward average, toward what everyone else is doing.

Our job? Push back. Move toward what makes us unique, with velocity.

Remember: velocity = speed + direction.

Without both, we're just busy being typical. Entropy wins.

We have to pay a price for being different, and it's worth it. But don't expect it to be easy or free. We'll have to put energy into it continuously.

So ask yourself: in what ways does the world pull at you to make you normal? How much work does it take to maintain what makes you different?

That distinctiveness? That's our direction. And choosing the right direction changes everything.

Direction Requires Differentiation

Our direction needs to be different from everyone else's.

In physics, velocity is relative. You're only moving fast compared to something else. Same here. If we all move in the same direction at the same speed, our velocity is ZERO relative to each other. We're just on a crowded path where everyone cancels each other out.

Doing something nobody else is doing is harder than it sounds.

I first felt this at 21.

I was lost. So I asked myself: what do I actually want to do?

The answer: I liked kids. I liked teaching. I liked playing with new technology. Things I wished I'd learned at school but didn't.

So I built one of Australia's first coding schools for kids.

The obvious path was tutoring. It was proven, safe, and everyone was doing it. I chose to follow what excited me most. Turned down the grad role and built the coding school instead. That one decision changed the trajectory of my life.

That choice led to everything that followed. I worked with founding executives from early Canva. That led to VEED, where I helped scale from 0 to 100M+ users—a company that went from bootstrapping to raising from Sequoia.

I've bootstrapped my own companies. I've worked across the EU, the US, and Asia with people from different cultures.

But it wasn't straightforward. I went broke. Multiple times. Applied to startup jobs and accelerators—got rejected. After I landed a job, I got fired within three months. Burned through everything during two COVID lockdowns, keeping staff on payroll.

Differentiated paths appear risky and scary. That's what makes them differentiated. The signal is feeling pulled toward them anyway.

All of it traced back to choosing a different path.

That's what direction means. Moving toward something distinct from what everyone else is doing.

But direction alone doesn't create velocity. You also need to actually move in that direction—consistently, over time. That's the speed component. Without both, you're just planning.

Building Velocity

You don't build velocity by doing more things or being busier. You build it by covering distance in one direction, consistently.

You build it by:

1. Creating and putting something out into the world → covering distance
2. Staying consistent in your distinct direction → making sure each thing points the same way

This is why breaking tasks into small, imperfect steps and creating them today is critical.

Perfectionism kills velocity. It's a closed loop—we get stuck perfecting details, lose sight of the whole, and never actually move.

"Instead of creating freely and allowing errors to reveal themselves later as insights, we often get mired in getting the details right."

- Julia Cameron, The Artist's Way

We can't learn from plans. We learn by creating and letting errors become insights. Put it out there imperfectly. Here's the thing: we're the only ones who think the first version matters. Most people won't notice until our tenth. Create anyway.

As long as it's out there, we're covering displacement. We're building velocity.

Fast Systems Get Fed More

Here's something else about speed that compounds:

Speed changes what feels possible.

When something is fast, it feels easy and cheap to do. It gives us energy and excitement. So we do it more.

When something is slow, it feels hard and expensive. It becomes a drag, and we avoid it.

Take email. When we respond quickly, people send us more emails. The interaction feels effortless—they know they'll get something back.

Same with creating. If we put things out quickly and frequently, users give us more feedback, and we learn faster. The whole cycle compounds.

Fast systems get fed more. Slow systems starve.

Google ran experiments where they added tiny delays to search results. Just 100-400 milliseconds. Barely noticeable. But even these minuscule delays resulted in measurable drops: 0.2% to 0.6% fewer searches per user.

When they tested a half-second delay, traffic dropped 20%.

And here's the kicker: even after they removed the delay, users still searched less. Speed changed their long-term behaviour.

Amazon found the same thing. Every 100ms of added latency costs them 1% in sales. Not 1% on that page. 1% in total sales.

These aren't small numbers. And it's not just about websites.

It's about everything. How fast we respond. How fast we create. How fast we iterate. How fast we move in our distinctive direction.

Velocity itself becomes a competitive advantage.

Velocity Builds Momentum

And once we have velocity, momentum protects it.

In physics, momentum = mass × velocity (p = mv). It measures how hard something is to stop.

When we have velocity and even a little bit of mass (us individually), we have momentum.

And here's the thing in life and in business: obstacles will hit. The world pulls us back to typical. Money gets tight. We doubt ourselves at 3 am. Things get hard.

Momentum keeps us moving when everything says stop.

Most people wait. They want the right skills, the right team, and more resources.

The formula shows why that's backwards.

Momentum = mass × velocity. Anything times zero is zero. If we're not moving—if velocity is zero—we have zero momentum. No matter how much mass we stack up.

But we're at least one person. That's some mass. The moment we start creating, we have momentum.

And here's what happens: people join when they see where we're going. We pick up skills by actually building. Mass gathers around velocity, not the other way around.

Sam Altman put it simply:

"Momentum is a self-fulfilling prophecy."

- Sam Altman

Start with what we have. Build velocity first.

Because once we have momentum—even just from our own effort—the obstacles that would've stopped us at zero become speed bumps.

Start.

Conclusion

This article sat in my drafts for years.

An article about velocity, killed by a lack of velocity. The irony isn't lost on me.

So I shipped it. Imperfect.

Now let's be honest: what's our velocity been on the thing that actually matters?

Not the noise. The life we want to build. The things we'd like to create for the world. The person we want to become.

How long has it been sitting in our heads?

Life is not a dress rehearsal. This is it.

Build velocity. Fight back.

And most importantly, be kind to yourself and one another. That's what keeps us moving forward together.

Lots of love.

Vin.