Topics: Calm Productivity Alignment - orienting business intent Leadership
And so does nature. It formulates the world as a minimization problem: every natural system tries to be as lazy as possible. Action captures the difference between a system’s kinetic energy and its potential energy, accumulated over time. Lighting zig-zags so it can go through the most conductive pockets of air. Water flowing downhill carves river channels that tend toward the path of least resistance — except when disturbed. Over geological time, the rivers’ paths reflect energy minimization. And people are no different.
“The path of least action” for people is our environment. Broadly, we will do the lowest friction actions needed to navigate our environment. Like the river, we’ll continue like this until disturbed. And this is where people go wrong. They try to create local changes, which creates local optimality.
The solution is to submit to your laziness. Design an environment where the easiest actions are the ones you want to do. Where each small step you take inches you closer to global (i.e. long-term) improvement — Baby steps beat Herculean feats.
References
Thinking In Systems The Personal MBA Image Source: https://www.lennyhu.com/post/179991559076/local-vs-global-maximum