“To every action there is always opposed an equal reaction.”
—Sir Isaac Newton

Times change; everyone knows this. Change is that great constant that coincides with the passage of time. I used to work in a call center for the wireless phone industry: Starting as a vanilla agent in the receivables management department, I became one of the fastest employees to move into the “resolutions” department where the duty du jour was to assist agents in doing their jobs and assist customers in escalated situations. Just as any high technology industry, the wireless industry changes quickly. If something didn’t change (at least) on a weekly basis, something was wrong…and the next change would often be much bigger than the changes that would have normally occurred over the course of the last week or more that had not had change.

The easily-learned, but difficult to adapt to principle is that things change. Each day, all around us, we see things changing. However…what is the propensity for people to change along with the changing times?

There are conventional wisdoms abound here. Conventional wisdoms, as anyone whom as read here any time in the recent or distant past, understands that this sort of wisdom is often nothing more than convenient. The short answer is that people can change, but it can be difficult for them to do so.

The longer answer: Sir Isaac Newton, the guy that once proverbially had an apple fall onto his head, then determined that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction and developed a brand new system of math to describe the phenomena that he had discovered in the universe. Among his definition of the brave new universe that was coming to know the world was the concept of inertia. This principle of classical mechanics dictates that an object at rest will stay at rest and, likewise, an object in motion will tend to stay in motion. People don’t change because they are often held back by inertia such that they have behaviors which hold them back. While I can’t cite the research, I recall hearing once that after a couple weeks of “staying home, holed up in the house,” doing little to nothing productive, a person’s brain chemistry changes fundamentally, such that they are more apt to continue in that mode of living: I’ve witnessed this around me over the years and experienced it myself once, during a down period. I have often asked myself about the madness in the minds of these people.

It seriously requires a person to force themselves to get off of their behind and go out and do something.

An interesting corollary to this: How does one deal with the constant of change?

Most of the time people are resistant to change. Going back to my days in the call center business I learned one critical thing: The people that resist change often get left behind. The people whom grasp onto the change, ride the wave, and become a part of the change, “change agents” and “change warriors,” often find themselves benefiting from the change rather than becoming a casualty of it. However, I have a caveat coupled with a case study: Be careful not to become a casualty of the change

Momentum from the Funk

After last week’s post, I couldn’t help but to think about how closely the words initiative and inertia are alike. Anyone reading my blog for any significant amount of time understands that part of my background is in physics, and therefore I like to apply the classic Galilean notion of the simple forces involved in a given system. In this instance the simple forces involved fall onto Sir Isaac Newton.

One of Newton’s assertions as a premier physicist, natural philosopher, of the time was that an object at rest tends to stay at rest: Once there, it doesn’t like to go anywhere. Sound familiar? People, I have come to realize, are much the same way. I’ve even heard it stated to go as far as that, after a couple weeks of stagnation, a person’s body chemistry can change to feed their sloth. Furthermore, without some sort of energy applied to the system…without even trying to do something to get out of such a funk…entropy ensues, chaos reigns, and it becomes even more difficult.

About a year ago several events transpired over the course of a few months, putting me into a depression of sorts. I thought it would pass, as certain times it tends to do, however it only got worse. Taking its toll on things, I holed myself up in my little world, tucked away in a comfort zone, and only interacted with the world on an as-needed basis. I hid from the remainder of it.

Fast forward to several months forward: I knew where I was at, I knew where I had been; I realized that I was in a low point in my life and the manifestations of that state of mind had begun to take its toll on things that were close to me and held dear. What did it take?

Energy applied to a system at rest will have a tendency to move it along a prescribed force vector. In other words, a kick in the pants got me going in the right direction—anywhere that was away from my present state of mind at the time. This process to gain momentum found me first reflecting through long and deep sessions of how events would transpire. What I came up with were things that were right under my nose all along, I just needed to watch and to listen, being mindful of opportunities.

Of course, throughout my affiliation in each of these places, tapping into my initiative, momentum has started to gain: Momentum that, I feel, given enough time and energy will result in the ultimate goal of my larger dreams being achieved…the grand scheme of things.

As I said last week, a personal mantra of yours when confronted with the notion of adversity between the “here” and the “there:” “If it is going to be…it is up to me.”