Critical Mass and Inertia
Critical mass and inertia are great concepts and ones you can apply to your own life. Understanding these two principles will change how you approach everything you’re trying to achieve. First, let’s start with critical mass.
Reaching Critical Mass
Critical mass is the term used when the minimum amount needed for something to happen is reached. It’s the threshold you have to cross before anything actually changes. Before that point, nothing happens. After that point, everything happens. The problem is most people give up right before they reach it.
In simple terms, if your fire isn’t hot enough, your pan’s not going to boil. If your oven isn’t hot enough, your Yorkshire puddings are never going to rise. If you don’t reach escape velocity, your rocket is never going to get into orbit. There are certain things in life where if you never put in enough energy, you’re never going to reach the minimum level needed to succeed. You can’t half-boil water. You can’t sort of reach orbit. You either do it or you don’t.
Get yourself a pan full of water. Without the right amount of energy, it’s never going to turn into steam. You can heat it to 90 degrees, 95 degrees, 99 degrees, but until you hit 100 degrees at sea level, it’s just hot water. All that effort, all that energy, and it’s still just water. But just one more degree, and everything changes.
Some people never reach critical mass. They never put the energy they need into what they really want, and guess what, they never succeed. They put in effort, they work hard, they try their best. But they stop at 90 degrees and wonder why nothing’s changing. They’re so close, but close doesn’t count. Close is still failure when you needed to reach a critical mass.
It may be that you think you deserve to be rich, or that your life should change for the better. Possibly things are so bad that you think something good must be just around the corner, or maybe it’s because you’ve been waiting so long. But here’s the wake-up call. It’s never going to happen. Because some things in life take the time and enough effort to reach critical mass. Deserving it doesn’t matter. Wanting it doesn’t matter. Needing it doesn’t matter. Only reaching critical mass matters with the energy you put in.
I see people who’ve been trying to lose weight for years. They’re eating a bit better, exercising a bit more, making small changes. But it’s not enough. They never reach the critical mass of effort needed to actually lose weight and keep it off. They’re at 90 degrees, 95 degrees, wondering why they’re not seeing results. Because 95 degrees is still not boiling.
Or people trying to change careers. They’re reading about it, thinking about it, maybe taking a course here and there. But they never put in the concentrated effort needed to actually make the transition. They’re building a fire that’s not hot enough to cook anything. All that effort, all that time, and they’re still in the same place because they never reached critical mass.
Building Momentum
This is where momentum comes in, and it’s something different but equally important. If critical mass is what’s needed for certain changes to happen, momentum is what keeps you moving once you get started. Momentum is quite simply what builds up and keeps you going in the same direction once you’re moving — the more force and effort you put in, and the longer you keep it up, the more of it you have.
When a bus or car suddenly stops, passengers lurch forward. Your body wants to keep moving at the previous speed due to inertia — the same property, correctly used this time, that resists a change in motion.
If you build momentum, you keep moving. The quality that really helps you in life is that once you’re moving, momentum means you keep moving in that direction too. This is why the hardest part is always starting. Once you’re moving, staying in motion is relatively easy. But getting started requires enormous effort, because you’re fighting against your own inertia — the tendency to just keep doing whatever you’re already doing, which is probably keeping you stuck exactly where you are.
Putting in energy, force and effort builds momentum. It keeps you moving even when your energy levels dip, but it keeps you moving. So if what you want needs critical mass to happen, chances are you’ll need to build momentum to make those changes happen in the direction you want to go. The good thing is that once critical mass is reached, momentum also keeps you going even further along that road.
Put no effort in, and you don’t build momentum — you stay put. A body, in this case your body and in this concept your life, will remain at rest, or carry on in the direction it’s going, unless acted on by an external force. That’s inertia — I’ve totally butchered Newton’s first law to make the point, but you get the gist, I hope. The point is this: if you’re not moving, you’ll stay not moving. If you’re moving in the wrong direction, you’ll keep moving in the wrong direction. Unless you apply sufficient force and energy to change it to the direction you want to go in — and once you do, it’s momentum, not inertia, that keeps carrying you there.
Putting Critical Mass and Momentum Together
Here’s what most people don’t understand about these two concepts. They’re connected. You need to apply enough force to reach critical mass, and once you reach it, you need to keep applying force to build momentum. The mistake people make is thinking that reaching critical mass once is enough. It’s not. You need to reach it and then keep applying force to maintain momentum in the right direction.
Think about trying to push a car that’s not running. Getting it moving from a standstill is incredibly hard. That’s you fighting against its inertia, which is keeping it stationary. But once you get it rolling, keeping it rolling is much easier — that’s momentum working in your favour. The car wants to keep moving now. But if you stop pushing before you’ve built enough momentum, it’ll roll to a stop against the friction, and you’re back to square one.
This is why consistency matters more than intensity. One massive effort that gets you to critical mass but then stops won’t build momentum. You’ll fall back below critical mass and have to start again. But sustained effort, even if it’s less intense, builds momentum that keeps you moving forward. You get the compounding effect of momentum, where each day’s effort builds on the previous day’s until you’re moving forward almost automatically.
You can want things. You may think you even deserve things. You can tell me how bad things are. But unless you put some effort in, and enough effort in, things just aren’t going to change. This isn’t motivational speak. This is physics. This is mathematics. This is how the universe works, and you’re part of the universe.
I had a patient once who came to me complaining that nothing was working. He’d tried every diet, every exercise plan, every supplement. Nothing worked. When I asked him how long he’d stuck with each one, the answer was always the same. A week, maybe two. He was putting in effort, but never enough to reach critical mass. He was heating the water to 80 degrees, then giving up and trying a different pot a few months later. Then heating that one to 75 degrees and giving up again. Years of effort, but never in one direction long enough to actually boil the water.
The solution isn’t to try harder for a week. The solution is to try consistently enough for long enough to reach critical mass and build momentum. Once you’ve got momentum, maintaining it is relatively easy. But building it from nothing requires sustained, concentrated effort in one direction. Not scattered effort in multiple directions. Not intense effort followed by nothing. Sustained effort, consistently applied, until you cross the threshold.
Things Get Easier, But Not Easy
Here’s how you know if you’ve reached critical mass. Things start to feel easier. Not easy, but easier. When you’re below critical mass, every single effort feels like pushing a boulder uphill. Nothing compounds, nothing builds, every day feels as hard as the first day. When you’ve reached critical mass and built some momentum, you still have to put in effort, but now that effort is maintaining momentum rather than creating it from nothing.
If you’ve been working on something for months or years and it still feels as hard as day one, you haven’t reached critical mass. You’re putting in effort, but not enough or not consistently enough to cross the threshold. You need to either increase the intensity or increase the consistency or both. Because what you’re doing now isn’t working, and doing more of what doesn’t work won’t suddenly make it work.
The other thing about critical mass is that it’s different for different things. Some goals require enormous amounts of sustained effort to reach critical mass. Others require less. But you need to understand what you’re dealing with. Trying to reach orbit requires massive, sustained thrust. Boiling water requires less energy but still requires reaching 100 degrees. Knowing which one you’re attempting helps you calibrate your effort appropriately.
Most people underestimate what’s required to reach critical mass for the things they want. They think a bit of effort should be enough. They think good intentions should count. They think trying hard for a little while should produce results. It doesn’t work that way. Physics doesn’t care about your intentions. Critical mass is critical mass, and if you don’t reach it, nothing changes.
The good news is that once you reach critical mass and build momentum, maintaining it is much easier than building it. The bad news is that most people quit right before they would have reached it. They put in most of the effort needed and give up most of the time, never knowing they were a few degrees away from everything changing.
Don’t be that person. Understand that some things require reaching critical mass before anything changes. Understand that building momentum takes sustained effort in one direction. Put in the work, be consistent, and keep going long enough to cross the threshold. Because on the other side of critical mass is where everything you want becomes possible.
Further reading
- Newton, I. — Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica
- Schelling, T. C. — Micromotives and Macrobehavior
- Gladwell, M. — The Tipping Point
- Clear, J. — Atomic Habits
- Duckworth, A. — Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance