Entropy Always wins

Disorder is the natural state of everything. I’ve seen it occur in products, teams, companies, codebases, and even individuals. We’re not talking some dramatic implosion or anything like that. Just this gradual slide into irrelevance. Products fall behind customers’ expectations. Teams are busy in alignment meetings and not shipping. Companies lose track of why they exist in the first place. Codebases become unwieldy or “legacy”. People avoid the gym and interpersonal conflict in the name of harmony.

That’s entropy in action. Entropy doesn't announce itself. It's always there, in the background, turning everything to shit…unless it’s actively managed. Your codebase gets messier unless you actively prune it. Your processes get heavier unless you relentlessly simplify them. The body slowly breaks down unless you intentionally rebuild it.

Physics calls this entropy. It’s the second law of thermodynamics. It’s also the default state of everything.

Fighting entropy sucks, there’s no two ways about it. You're debugging code at 6pm on a Friday night while your friends are at happy hour. You're dragging yourself out of bed in the morning to hit the gym while it’s snowing outside. You're challenging dysfunction at work. You’re having a tough conversation with a friend. You’re participating in city politics to make your neighborhood better.

All of this requires a certain level of resilience, patience, and a higher tolerance for pain. A few people attempt it, that’s why there’s a ton of disorder and dysfunction all around us. Entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and change agents embody that to a tee. Maybe they're masochists. Or maybe they just can't stand watching things rot.

In physics, entropy and stasis are opposites. But in human systems, both lead to decay, and therefore, disorder. We know from Newton's first law of motion that an object at rest (i.e. in stasis) will remain at rest (i.e. not growing or evolving) until an unbalanced, external force acts upon it. To move something from stasis to motion, the applied force must be greater than the force of static friction that is holding the thing in place.

So while stasis isn't entropy, it creates the conditions for entropy to win. Because in human systems, if you’re not moving and evolving, you’re dying.

In a company setting, for example, decay at times shows up as prudence. As rigor. As indecision or delayed decision. As process. As analysis paralysis. It’s the collective force that ensures that motion is halted, or at best, slowed down. None of this done maliciously, but when the incentives are misaligned, entropy finds a way in.

That is how Kodak died holding 1,100 digital imaging patents. That's how Blockbuster passed on buying Netflix for $50 million. They weren't stupid. They were just too comfortable in stasis and too hubristic to imagine ever being unseated as the dominant incumbents in their respective industries. That’s the natural order of things, especially for big companies. There’s a reason the Innovator’s Dilemma is a thing.

This is also why innovation is the most effective antidote to entropy for big companies.

But innovation can’t be willed into existence. Every breakthrough innovation starts with someone getting pissed off enough to fix something. The iPhone happened because Jobs thought existing phones were garbage. Airbnb exists because two guys couldn't afford rent and had an air mattress. The agitation comes first. The innovation follows.

Look, I get it. Fighting entropy through innovation is really hard. Building new things that never existed before is exhausting and you’ll usually fail before you succeed. But here's what I've observed having been part of innovations that both worked and failed: you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take. You may win some of the shots you take, and remember that entropy always wins if you let it.

Entropy might be the default state, but the degree in which it exists is in our hands. I fight it daily in my personal life and I fight it at work. Because even though it’s the natural state of things, it can be delayed for now, at least on my watch.