Law of Least Effect

Given two paths to the same result, people — and water, and markets, and habits — take the easier one. This is not laziness; it is physics wearing a human face. Energy is precious, and systems that waste it do not survive.

Watch it rule your day. You eat what is nearest, watch what is one click away, speak to whoever is in the room. The path of least resistance is not a character flaw. It is the riverbed of behaviour, carved by every drop that ever ran downhill.

This is why willpower fails so reliably: it asks you to climb uphill while the whole landscape tilts the other way. The dieter fighting the snack drawer is fighting the landscape.

So do not fight the law — hire it. Redesign the slopes. Put the good choice on the downhill path and the bad one uphill: the fruit at eye level, the apps deleted, the gym between work and home. You will not become a person of iron discipline. You will become a well-designed river.