Time & Perspective Quote by Bryant H. McGill

“Enthusiasm” here isn’t treated as a mood; it’s framed as propulsion. McGill borrows the language of physics and engineering - “energy,” “force,” “momentum” - to make an inner state feel measurable, even inevitable. That’s the tell. The line is less interested in describing enthusiasm than in recruiting it as a tool: an internal engine you can choose, cultivate, and then ride.

The subtext carries a self-help pragmatism with a spiritual sheen. By invoking “the human soul and mind,” McGill stitches together two audiences that don’t always share a bookshelf: the productivity crowd and the meaning-seekers. The claim implies a unified self where emotion (enthusiasm) can align cognition (mind) and purpose (soul) into forward motion. It’s motivational rhetoric doing what it does best: collapsing messy psychological reality into a clean causal chain. Feel the spark, and the rest follows.

“Literal momentum” is the strategic overreach. Souls don’t have inertia in the scientific sense, but the word “literal” dares you to treat the metaphor as fact. That insistence is part of the persuasion: if enthusiasm is “literal,” then acting without it becomes not just harder, but unnatural, like pushing against the laws of motion.

Contextually, this fits a late-20th/early-21st-century ethos where personal transformation is narrated in startup terms: optimize your internal fuel, build velocity, keep shipping. McGill’s intent is encouragement, but also a quiet moralizing nudge - stagnation isn’t a condition; it’s a failure to generate force.