It’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing

In other words, it’s not the velocity, it’s the acceleration. Velocity is the rate of change of displacement. Acceleration is the rate of change of velocity. Velocity is a vector quantity because it consists of both magnitude and direction. Acceleration is also a vector quantity as it is just the rate of change of velocity. What does this mean in context of your life? Before we get onto that we gotta go back to Newton’s first law, an object in motion tends to stay in motion unless an external force acted upon it. When a ball rolls down the hill, it will roll until eternity if there are no conflicting forces such as friction and no obstacles in it’s way.

It means you can live your whole life, be born, get in school, get into uni, graduate, get a job, get married, get a promotion, have children, and so on, with constant velocity, a ball rolling down a hill with no obstacles.

Sounds too ideal? Let’s imagine a smaller time-frame. When you first graduated uni, it’s hard to find a job, you’re working really hard and sending applications everywhere (+acceleration), you got accepted (-acceleration), you started working (+acceleration, trying to find a constant velocity), you’re on your 4th month of working in this company, you know how it works, you do your tasks well (constant velocity), you do this for the next x years of your life, or until you get a promotion and try to find the new constant velocity of your work.

Usually there’s a standard for the constant velocity, imagine car lanes, you can’t go slow in a fast lane, or fast in a slow lane. Eventually you’ll have to adapt to that. Say you got into a promotion, you obviously can’t do worse than from your previous position or your position will be threatened. Consistency is key, and most of the time if you’re able to keep up with the required constant velocity, you’ll do fine on that lane.

What do we get from this? An acceleration happens at every major time frame in our lives it’s either a positive acceleration (more effort) or negative acceleration (less effort), most of the time it’s not the velocity that determines where you are, it’s the acceleration. Ever heard of the Pareto principle? It’s an aphorism which asserts that 80% of outcomes (or outputs) result from 20% of all causes (or inputs) for any given event. In business, a goal of the 80/20 rule is to identify inputs that are potentially the most productive and make them the priority.

You can apply this logic to any time-frame at any given time, here’s an exercise, try to quantify your acceleration and velocity at a daily rate. See what is your “extra effort”, “less effort” and “usual effort”. See if you like them, and if you don’t, what you can do to tweak them.

But I’m moving too fast here.

Let’s go back to the title of this story, it’s a commonly known saying in physics, but I was quoting Moriarty from the BBC Sherlock, fuck I love that series. Anyway, it’s a reference to the fact that when someone fall, they don’t die, it’s the sudden stop when they hit the ground that kills them due to the heavy impact of the body colliding with a solid object. When you’re falling, with no external force you’re falling at a constant velocity, but you hit the ground with negative acceleration. That negative acceleration is what kills you.

I find that statement so interesting. If we fall with constant velocity, it means we have time factor in our hands, and we can use that to mitigate.

What “kills” us is not that we miss one day of exercising, it’s missing the days after, that turn to weeks, months, and we stop exercising cause it’s too hard to start again. What “kills” us is not the one cigarette we tried when we were hanging out with our friends, it’s the cigarettes after that makes it so difficult to stop. Oftentimes we fall, and we don’t realize that we are falling, not until the ground hits us. That’s what constant velocity does to us, going at the same pace, doing the same habits without being conscious of the magnitude and the direction that we are heading.

Back to Newton’s first law, when a ball rolls, it keeps rolling. So what can we do to stop it?

This is where external forces come into place, for example in the cigarettes case, you either put yourself in an environment where its uncomfortable to smoke (friction force) or try to lock your expense for cigarettes (obstacles). Will it stop the ball from rolling? Yes, eventually. Will it be hard? Yes, definitely. But it’s not the fall that kills you, it’s the landing, and most of the time we don’t know how far we are from hitting the ground.

We have to ask ourselves if we’re comfortable with our motions, and if we’re not, what can we do to change the magnitude and the direction of that.

PS: This writing does not apply for cases of jumping off the roof of buildings