Sometimes I find that I am wrong, and I hate that. My wife is a science teacher. This means that she has some science homework she must grade on the kitchen table quite often. She teaches 8th grade science and I like to believe that I am smarter than an 8th grader. So I peek at the homework.
Recently a worksheet was on the table illustrating the forces at work on an object that was moving at a constant speed. The question on the worksheet asked for the student to select which image represented the forces the object was working with at the time of its constant velocity. I looked at the images and saw none that I thought were accurate.
The images to select from had the object with arrows of various sizes pointing left and right, up and down. The correct image had an object with arrows equal in size pointing in the direction the object was moving and in the opposite direction. I stared at that image for a while and thought, “How can the forces be equal and the object still be moving?” This lead to me challenging my wife, something I would highly recommend against anyone doing on a routine basis.
Most people know Newton’s laws of motion. The first law states that an object at rest will stay at rest and an object in motion will stay in motion unless an external force is applied to it. The second law states basically that Force = Mass x Acceleration, which implies the conservation of momentum. Once an object is moving, it can maintain a given velocity with less force than it took to get up to that speed. Even though I know the laws of motion, wrapping my head around them on a practical level was challenging.
To understand this concept, I ran analogy after analogy through my head. Cars moving at a constant rate of speed need to overcome frictional forces. To overcome means that you need more power, in my mind. I was getting my mind twisted as I attempted to understand this concept. Why is the opposing force exactly opposite?
Finally the analogy that I could understand popped into my head. I thought of a business that is maintaining at a constant pace. It is not growing, it is not dying, it is flat. Realistically businesses like this do not exist and, realistically, objects rarely maintain a perfect, constant velocity either. So the analogy worked.
In business when you are stagnant or maintaining you are having to do some work. You cannot sit still to maintain. You do need to take some actions to overcome the forces of attrition such as customers leaving or buying less and employees or machines coming and going or even breaking down. Who hasn’t had an employee break down? Maybe it was caused by too much friction in your office.
You as a business owner must expel energy to maintain your business as you work against these opposing forces. Like a driver that lifts a foot off of a car accelerator, a business that stops working will eventually stop growing or even maintaining.
The realization finally came to me as I was driving down the highway. I realized that car engineers know what a given car needs for power to maintain a certain speed. So they make cars with engines that can do that. They also make engines that can get cars up to those speeds.
This is where the analogy of business in regards to motion begins to crumble. In business you rarely know exactly what effort you need to put into your business for it to grow or even to maintain. You will rarely be able to foresee all opposing forces that affect your business. The answer to how much energy should you put into your business is typically all that you have. Often with the notion that you may need to find even more energy you were not aware you had. The constants in business are so limited that you cannot create an equation for success that includes accurate, stable numbers. Innovation and marketing, it turns out, are very tough to measure.
So after concluding that it takes energy to maintain a constant speed for an object as well as a business, I have concluded that my wife was right, I was wrong, Newton was smart and that in order to grow in business you need to add more energy than it takes just to maintain. All you need to do is to overcome your opposing forces beyond the strength of their opposition. That makes it sound too easy. Generally speaking this is a huge pain in the ass. The amount of energy needed to grow rather than maintain gets exponentially higher the faster you want to grow. Because it is worth it.
Now get to work, you have opposing forces you need to overcome.
James Kademan is a Business Coach for Draw In Customers Business Coaching in Madison, Wisconsin. When he isn’t scratching his head while studying 8th grade homework assignments he helps business owners achieve success in business and beyond by increasing their momentum. He blogs successfully to the world at www.drawincustomers.com. If you are considering hiring a business coach, take a moment to call James at (608)210-2221. Smile, you are finally using all that you learned.
