Principle 2: Don’t fight entropy, work with it.
I’m a science geek. Loud and proud. It’s often you’ll hear me evangelise terms like “activation energy”, or “fruitful collisions” or “minimum effective dose”...the list is endless. But one concept I learned at university during foundational chemistry (which, yes, I completely flunked) - entropy - took until putting together a 1000 piece puzzle with my partner to truly appreciate.
Now how did the puzzle pieces fall into place with entropy? Well, you see, I’m not usually a puzzle person. I don’t really understand why people get so immersed in them. So engrossed in their singular focus to complete the puzzle. That’s until…yes, you guessed it, I actually did a puzzle.
All consuming. Tick.
Pull-your-hair-out-frustrating. Tick.
Dopamine peak when you finally complete it. Priceless.
And somehow, during the puzzle grind, it dawned on me: why is this so difficult? The answer, you guessed it, is entropy.
Think for a moment about the number of ways the puzzle pieces must fit together, to complete the puzzle as it was designed. One, right?
Now think about the number of ways the puzzle pieces don’t fit together. A very, very large number that I don’t want to calculate and will leave to ChatGPT.
Entropy is a measure of disorder. It’s simply saying that there are so many more ways the puzzle can be incomplete than complete. That disorder is more likely than order.
“The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of nature.”
We see this in the everyday minutiae of life as well:
The sand castle you build, only for it to wash away a day after.
Trimming the weeds in your garden, only to have it look like Jumanji reincarnate if not pruned for a few weeks.
And finally the formation of the human body, which is clearly a complex process but somehow (and generally) ends up in a state of order.
We don’t appreciate that imperfection is more likely than perfection, even though there is a clear desire for the latter.
Why then is don’t fight entropy, work with it the second of my operating principles?
Because it helps me see that the world is, by and large, a probability distribution. Of possibilities and probabilities, most of which you cannot control (g’day randomness) and a teeny-tiny portion that you can control influence.
Deliberate Practice
Each time I try to change something about myself, I realise the path of least resistance is to not do the thing I want to do. Even if it’s good for me. Or rather, especially if it’s good for me.
I use this principle to reverse engineer and achieve an outcome I want. It reminds me to structure my environment so that outcome is more likely to take place. It’s obviously no certainty. But, if I roll the dice several times - that is, I put in the work to structure my environment - the odds of that outcome are pushed in my favour.
An apt example is how I built my running habit:
I laid out my clothes the night before;
I set my alarm;
I asked to run with a friend;
I got my partner to set her alarm to wake me up in case I was in sloth-mode;
I predetermined my running route so I didn’t have to think and;
I would leave the curtain slightly open so light could creep in to wake me up.
All these pillars work in tandem to make it more likely that I go for a run. It doesn’t guarantee the outcome. It simply means there is more than one point of failure. There’s redundancy. And this redundancy is an implicit part of the structure I’ve created.
Without this structure, I might run 3 or 4 times for every 10 attempts. The structure pushes the odds in my favour. What if I do it 6 times for every 10 attempts instead? And then I extrapolate that across 1 year, 5 years or even 10 years. Spoiler alert, the power of marginal gains, compounded across time, really adds up.
Th end result? I’ve run a lot more than I would have otherwise.
In summary, the path of least resistance becomes the structure that I create. I don’t rely on one part of the structure. The reliance is on the entire structure itself, so that the person I want to become - my aspirational identity which in this case is not to run, but become a runner - relies on the system, not your effort or willpower.
“The ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order.”
