Like most of us, I first met inertia in a physics classroom. It did take me some time to internalize it. A body continues in its state unless some force acts on it. Little did I realize then how much the same idea would apply to the other dimensions of life.
Unlike physics, in life, it hides much better. Because we are moving. Sometimes moving quite successfully. The calendar is full. The output is steady. The next milestone keeps arriving. But the direction may not have changed in years.
The more expertise, reputation, and success we accumulate, the more we have invested in the current trajectory, and the more force it takes to change direction.
The trap is that inertia photographs well. It looks like consistency, reliability, mastery. Every year on the same line can earn more recognition. From the outside, a high performer's inertia can be almost indistinguishable from performance.
Not all inertia is bad. Some of it is discipline, consistency, compounding. The dangerous kind is the inertia that keeps us moving long after we would have stopped choosing the direction.
It comes in different forms.
There is skill-set inertia. The comfort of operating where you are already an expert.
There is activation inertia. Wanting to pursue something different, but the capital, people, skills, or infrastructure required to test it make starting too expensive.
And there is success inertia. The current path keeps rewarding you, so you keep moving along it.
This is where AI gets interesting for me. Not simply because it helps us move faster. Because it can make changing direction cheaper. The would-be entrepreneur may no longer need a seed round and five hires just to test an idea. One person working with agents can prototype what once needed a team. A deep expert can venture into an adjacent field without first paying the full beginner cost of acquiring every supporting skill. AI, in that sense, lowers the activation energy required to move.
But lower activation energy does not tell us where to go. That still requires diagnosis.
What am I busy with today that I would not choose again?
I ran that question on myself this year. The answer was uncomfortable. Two decades of thinking, mostly kept closed source. Consumed in meetings and decks, then gone. Staying private photographed well too. It looked like discretion.
Publishing what I think, with AI as a collaborator, became one small way of applying force in a different direction. I even gave that experiment a home, a small publication called Digital Confluence, where these ideas now live beyond the meetings and decks where most of my thinking had traditionally ended. This post is part of it.
Perhaps that is the more interesting use of AI: not doing the same work faster. That can simply become inertia with better tooling. The opportunity is to use it to reduce the cost of testing a different direction, and then decide whether we have the will to move.