How To Reach Your Goals Faster with Isaac Newton’s Laws of Motion
Nature can answer our biggest questions and help us navigate our most difficult struggles.
Whether its exponential growth, standing out in a crowded marketplace, building an impressive network, going viral, getting fit or scoring a mate, observing lessons in nature can help us reach our goals.
And in order to best learn from nature, we can turn to science and in particular, physics.
Back in 1687, Sir Isaac Newton first published his three laws of motion in his book, Principia: Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy.
This post will focus predominantly on the first two laws, and how you can use them to help you get closer to your professional and personal goals, and get further away from your vices, more efficiently.
It is ultimately a foundational thought piece, and I welcome you to provide feedback, criticise, or augment it in the comments.
An object at rest stays at rest, and an object in motion stays in motion.
We call this state of rest inertia.
Mass is a good indicator of inertia — light objects are easy to move, but heavy objects are much harder to move. You might be able to push a toy truck along the road, but not so a 27,000 pound Mack truck.
Objects at rest will only move when they encounter an unbalanced force.
So, what is an unbalanced force, then?!
Say there’s a block atop a table. There are two unbalanced forces acting upon the block: the downwards pull of gravity and the upwards push of the table — these forces are of equal magnitude, and so they ‘balance’ each other out, so the block stays still, per the below.
The rate of change of momentum on a body is directly proportional to the force applied, and the direction of the force applied.
This is known as F = ma (Force = Mass x Acceleration)
Where:
Mass = the weight and size of an object (the resistance that a body of matter offers to a change in its speed or position upon the application of a force — the greater the mass of a body, the smaller the change produced by an applied force)
Acceleration = the rate of change in velocity
Velocity = Distance / Time
Taking our previous example, say someone applies force on the block from right to left, and there is nobody pushing the block from the left side.
The pressure being applied by the hand represents an unbalanced force, and so the block will move to the left.
Once the hand is removed, the block stops moving as it is being acted on by another unbalanced force in gravity.
There are several forces acting on an object to slow its velocity.
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