The inertia of rest!!

“Motivation is what gets you started. Habit is what keeps you going.”
                                                                                                                      ~Jim Ryun

Newton’s first law of motion is so apt in the real life. For non-science people, inertia is the characteristic of matter where a body in rest stays in rest and a body in motion stays in motion until an unbalanced force is applied upon it. I think this law applies very well to habits and in general, actions of human beings as well.

I had stopped writing for my blog while writing an article for the Singapore Business Review (found here) and more than a month after that it took all my will power to write this post. Which also gave me some time to think – what changed? I am still writing my thoughts every day, I still feel the flow when I am writing so why am I not writing on my blog? The answer was a series of excuses – while writing for SBR, I told myself that my sole focus should be the article to give my best to it. After finishing the article, for some reason I was convinced that I needed a break. And once I had taken the break, I just couldn’t find a post inspiring enough to compensate for my absence for a month plus. I have been away from my blog for a while, I had to have an out of the world post to restart. I am still unable to find that out of the world topic and decided that I will just write.

I think this applies to all of our habits. On hind sight, I came up with a few pointers as to how not to lose the good habits we spent so much time and energy in developing:

• If possible, we should not stop the habit altogether. May be reduce the level or intensity of it but stopping it all over makes it very hard. For my example above, I could have written half a post every week or may be a small post rather than the usual big one.
• If for some reason we have to stop the habit, it is alright to start small again – it doesn’t have to be out of the world or even at the same level as where you left earlier.

With this post, I acknowledge that I failed to write regularly and at the same time start my habit again.