I am Isaac Newton
ERT : 7 minutes
Do you remember those three laws of motion from your secondary school science textbook, anything? Distance, Displacement, Speed?! Not necessarily the equations, but anything? No right!
Conventionally, most of us see the three fundamental laws of motion proposed by Sir Isaac Newton in 1687 in his groundbreaking book “The Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy” as some kind of mysterious paradox, but it’s actually more than that. What if I told you we could use those three laws that made you scratch your head during your physics class as an interesting analogy for increasing your productivity, simplifying your work, and improving your life?
Fellas, Let the class begin.
First law of intertia:
An object either remains at rest or continues to move at a constant velocity until and unless acted upon by an external force.
Let’s talk about Procrastination. If you don’t know what procrastination is, it is the action of delaying or postponing something until the last minute or past the deadline. If getting to the gym, going for a run, writing an essay, or maybe finishing a mental task seems like a struggle to you, scientists want you to know that the struggle is real, and it’s happening inside your brain. It’s just because our minds are made to relax and being lazy. But as long as I remember, your mom, your english teacher and your boss will not entertain the same thought until and unless I am one of them (not Mom obviously).
Every one of us procrastinates on the daily basis. In fact, procrastination is one of the fundamental barriers which hold us from getting up from the couch, making accurate decisions, and living the dream life we’ve always thought of. But it is what it is, we can’t be productive all the time, so what’s the cache?
People actually don’t understand the silver lining between laziness and procrastination, Lazy people simply do nothing and they are just fine with it. Procrastinators have the desire to actually do something but can’t force themselves to start.
Newton’s very first law applies to procrastination. As Newton mentioned in his first law, objects at rest stay at rest also applied to our working analogy. Until and unless we don’t give a shot to finish our pending task, we may never taste the sweet side of the cake.
As Objects at rest stay at rest, the same thing works other way too. Objects in motion stay in motion. For doing things, the most important tool is to get started. You need to find that external force that is responsible to change your state and once you get started, it is much easier to stay in motion. Simple as that.
Don’t feel like going for a run or doing the exercise. You better put on your running shoes and fill up your water bottle, and that small start might be enough to get you out of the cliff.
Just to make clear, even this post took much longer than it should have, because Instead of writing, I spent a couple of days doing things like driving a Ferrari Turismo in GTA5, sitting on my desktop searching for some random animal like caterpillar, and thinking how easily he could conquer the world, then wondering if he could do dance lying on Lion’s back, and who would win between a butterfly and penguin, which ends up googling that and reading about it for a while. I was just procrastinating, but I got started eventually.
So in a nutshell, Your task is Newton’s object, Your thought of why would you have to do the task is Newton’s external force. If your force is enough to make that change in the object’s state, you see the object is in motion.
Always remember, motivation often comes after starting. Start small. Objects in motion stay in motion.
Second law of force:
F=ma. The vector sum of the forces on an object is equal to the mass of that object multiplied by the acceleration vector of the object. (i.e. Force equals mass times acceleration.)
This equation may seem topsy-turvy at the first sight but it involves two pivotal points. The force, F, is a vector quantity and comprises both magnitude and direction, if you are a nonscience student or a science student who failed in his/her science class, Understand the vector quantity by this example: When someone tells you to throw a ball twice as hard and to the right, a vector was just used. When someone tells you to drive northeast for about five miles, a vector was just used. So what exactly is a vector? Any quantity that needs to be fully described by identifying its magnitude and direction is a vector.
By magnitude, we mean the size of the quantity, such as length or strength. By direction, we mean where the vector is pointing or where it is being directed, such as left or right, north, south, east, or west, or even up or down, so to cut a long story short, the amount of work done depends majorly upon two things, the magnitude of force (how much work you are putting in) and direction (where that work is focused in), So if you want to get an object speeding up in a particular direction, then the size of the force you apply and the direction of that force will both make a difference.
As Stephen R. Covey mentioned in his book “The 7 habits of highly effective people”:
If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.” ~ Stephen R. Covey.
As a rule of thumb, To be more productive in any field, it’s not merely about how many working hours you are putting in (magnitude), it’s also about where are you putting those working hours (direction). Believe it or not, if you channelize your working hours properly you can apply the same Skillset to different domains and get unbelievably positive results in different directions.
Third law of action and reaction:
When one body exerts a force on a second body, the second body simultaneously exerts a force equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first body. (i.e. Equal and opposite forces.)
All of us try to become a better version of ourselves on the daily basis but the fact is we all have a different speed to make that happen. Our typical levels of productivity, efficiency, or managing things are often a balance of the various forces in our life.
If you look cross-eyed and inspect this law more closely, you will understand a simple mere fact that there isn’t anything exactly any “action and reaction” version of this law! First, no disrespect to heading - it’s quite excellent and catchy. However, when we put the words “action” and “reaction” in a description of forces, most people will think about movement on a single body. In fact, we might even see something like this in an example of Newton’s Third Law:
But the action-reaction pair works on two different bodies simultaneously. To understand this concept better, visualize a heavy box lying on the ground, Now when you push that box, it pushes back at you with an equal and opposite force (Third Law) so that the harder the force of your action, the greater the force of reaction until you apply a force great enough to cause the box to slide overcoming all the resistive forces. You then notice that it requires less force to cause the box to continue to slide.
Now consider yourself as that box lying on the axis of life at the origin and there are two linear axis points, one is effective, and the other is ineffective, same as the positive and negative x-axis sides. Forces like focus, positivity, love, and optimism help us reach closer to the effectiveness side of the axis while other forces like stressing too much, lack of sleep, and disturbed environment resist us.
If we want to make sure our box reaches the effective side of the axis, then we have two choices.
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The First option is to add more productive force. This is the “Power nap” option. We grind it out, drink another cup of coffee, buckle up and work harder. This is why people isolate themselves, which helps them to focus or watch a motivational video to pump themselves up. It’s all an effort to increase productive force and overpower the unproductive forces we face so that you get a thrust and move your box a bit closer to the effective side. But we can’t take the power nap for so long as at some point we would be exhausted and burned out, but for a brief amount of time taking a “Power nap” may revitalize you to perform better.
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The Second option is to eliminate the opposing and resistive forces. Simplify your life, learn how to say no to things that don’t matter to you, change your environment, reduce the number of responsibilities that you take on, work harder, focus more, and otherwise eliminate the forces that are holding you back.
If you are more prone to use your forces wisely and at the appropriate time, working on the second choice is the best way to reach the effective side of the axis in a very lesser time because you just can’t drink coffee every time and at some stage, your coffee packet would be empty and you need to buy one more from the nearest grocery store and that would require you getting up from the couch leaving your Netflix episode in half and I firmly don’t like this idea.
To find effectiveness in this chaotic world of self-doubt, compromises, distractions, brutal environmental conditions and pandemics teach these laws to your loved ones.
Just before wrapping up my thesis, I want you to ask yourself that is it your family background, peer pressure, parental influence, or some kind of societal pressure that is shaping your life or constructing your behavioral shape, and ultimately determining who you are turning out to be in your later years of life? Or is it your beliefs, education, academic, or life experiences that are determining this result? More or less I believe if we align our seesaw of life to more on the later side and less on the previous one, you would be more like you and less like what others want.
Certainly, many of these factors have had an influence on our lives. With no question. However, there is one thing that is playing the primary role in determining the outcome of our lives and those are the choices we make on the daily basis and the reactions we get supposedly.
Before going into the dark matter again, I have a request for you: No matter what we do, where we come from, what is our sex, religion, caste, or ethnicity, we all are one. It’s not only about you or me, it’s about the legacy we leave behind. What example we want to set for our future generations!? Human beings have already wiped out so many species and many of them out there are on the verge of extinction. I know most of the people who are reading this would not give even a second thought about it, but even if one of you understands and starts working in this very direction, it’s an act of accomplishment for me. Stop using plastics, Stop deforestation, Save marine life, and work towards sustainable development.
And that’s where my class ends. If you liked my thesis, share these laws with your friends and family. I shared them with the Ghost of Newton and he will share them with Einstein. Keep the counter rolling, subscribe to my mailing list down below to get the new post directly in your inbox.
That’s all for this time. Until then
पर्यावरण बचाओ पृथ्वी बचाओ. आवजो.