The Newtonian Physics of Life · Integrated Training

The Newtonian Physics of Life

I wrote this piece for another Skool community called the Career Change Collective. While Dave is the king at helping us gain control over stress, I am interested in sustainable performance through flow. Both of us want you guys to have awesome lives, so we swap ideas from time to time.

Here's my piece:

In physics, which I only took for one year and did quite badly in, we'd get questions where a trolley was at the top of a ramp with a certain mass, and we had to calculate the force, speed and acceleration it would have at different points of displacement. You could work this out if you knew the force of gravity, and the angle of the slope, which would create forces of acceleration, and then you'd subtract friction, which is a force of deceleration.

In life, sometimes people have enormous goals, like an Olympic Gold Medal. Everyone you know supports you. Companies will get behind you which will add accelerating forces to your trolley, but the goal is so darn big that the amount of friction and opposing forces of gravity, your body's weaknesses and all of the other competitors make it so difficult most of us fall short.

When your goals are too small, you know you're settling and compromising. You're taking a job to pay bills, which achieves a lesser goal for now but it creates friction in your mind. I think burnout is when the decelerating forces and the accelerating forces cancel each other out and you just stop.

There are a lot of self help books out there, and people like David Goggins who are masters at generating energy from nothing, but when the friction is in your mind, you only end up spinning your tyres.

This is where intrinsic motivators come in. Life will keep giving you bills, breakages and bastards, so you have to tap into the sustainable motivation drivers that give you enough energy to get through them. You need to cultivate your own accelerating forces to overcome the decelerating forces and make progress.

The deep work is, what contribution do I want to make between now and my last breath? What would I gladly fill my day with, even when my energy is low? Look for the path of most internal energy and least internal resistance. Then you can cultivate curiosity, passion, purpose, autonomy and mastery from there.

Let me know in the comments if you've experimented with flow. You could add 5 minutes of skateboarding or piano to the day plan. Chances are you'd lose track of time and do it for hours.

5 comments