Fighting Entropy

#125 - Why Everything Falls Apart (Unless You Do Something About It)

Hello friends! Hope you’re having a great weekend.
This email comes 1 day late because I spent the week skiing with the family, and it was the best time!

The inspiration for this post came from this tweet randomly popping in my feed. This is a reference to a letter Bezos wrote over 4 years ago, covering entropy and how to avoid it, in a corporate world. But the brilliance of this letter is that it puts the concept in framework that applies to many more areas of life.

The concept is, as often in my posts, pretty basic: imagine you walk into a spotless room. No clutter, everything in its place. Now, if you do nothing—if you simply leave the room untouched for weeks—what happens? Dust settles. Papers pile up. Disorder creeps in, not because of any specific action, but because that’s the natural state of things.

This is, literally, a fundamental law of the universe. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that entropy—disorder—always increases over time unless energy is applied to counteract it. In physics, entropy explains why hot coffee cools down, why metal rusts, and why life itself requires a constant input of energy just to sustain itself.

But entropy applies to businesses, careers, and personal development. Without deliberate effort, organizations slide into inefficiency. Individuals who stop learning become stagnant. Relationships weaken when left unattended. In every system, without intentional input, decay is inevitable.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is one of the most fundamental principles in physics. At its core, it states that entropy—the measure of disorder in a system—always increases over time in an isolated system. In simple terms, things naturally move from order to chaos unless energy is actively applied to maintain structure.

This law was formulated in the 19th century by Rudolf Clausius and William Thomson (Lord Kelvin). It was a groundbreaking insight because it not only explained how energy flows (from hot to cold, never the reverse) but also why certain processes are irreversible. A shattered glass will never spontaneously reassemble. Heat never flows from a cold object to a hot one without external work.

Beyond physics, the Second Law has deep implications for everything—from biology (why living organisms constantly need energy) to economics (why companies decline without reinvention) to everyday life (why your room gets messy on its own but never cleans itself). It was so revolutionary because it showed that disorder isn’t just common—it’s inevitable unless something actively counteracts it.

This is why entropy became a powerful metaphor for business, personal growth, and decision-making. Without effort, decay is the default.

In the 2020 letter to Shareholders Bezos quotes a passage from Richard Dawkins’ book The Blind Watchmaker:

“Staving off death is a thing that you have to work at. Left to itself – and that is what it is when it dies – the body tends to revert to a state of equilibrium with its environment. If you measure some quantity such as the temperature, the acidity, the water content or the electrical potential in a living body, you will typically find that it is markedly different from the corresponding measure in the surroundings. Our bodies, for instance, are usually hotter than our surroundings, and in cold climates they have to work hard to maintain the differential. When we die the work stops, the temperature differential starts to disappear, and we end up the same temperature as our surroundings. Not all animals work so hard to avoid coming into equilibrium with their surrounding temperature, but all animals do some comparable work. For instance, in a dry country, animals and plants work to maintain the fluid content of their cells, work against a natural tendency for water to flow from them into the dry outside world. If they fail they die. More generally, if living things didn’t work actively to prevent it, they would eventually merge into their surroundings, and cease to exist as autonomous beings. That is what happens when they die.”

The Entropic Forces in Business

In business, entropy shows up in a million different ways. A startup begins with a small, focused team moving fast, but as it scales, complexity creeps in—more meetings, more layers of management, more decision-making bottlenecks. A once-innovative company starts prioritising maintaining the status quo over risk-taking. Before long, the drive that made it successful starts eroding, not because anyone wanted it to, but because entropy is the default state of any organization left unchecked.

Companies don’t collapse overnight. They erode slowly, often in ways that aren’t immediately obvious:

• Bureaucracy expands. What starts as a way to improve coordination eventually leads to endless approvals and a culture of risk aversion.

• Customer obsession fades. The sharp focus on delighting customers gets diluted by internal politics and short-term revenue targets.

• Talent gets complacent. The urgency and energy that defined the early days give way to comfort and inertia.

Jeff Bezos saw this pattern early on, which is why he famously warned against Day 2 thinking in Amazon’s shareholder letters. In the 2020 letter, he wrote:

“If you want to be successful in business (in life, actually), you have to create more than you consume.”

This principle is Amazon’s built-in defense against entropy. If a company isn’t actively generating new value—whether through better products, more efficient operations, or stronger customer relationships—it’s decaying. There is no steady state.

The Tension Between Structure and Chaos

In the original twitter thread that inspired this post the writer touches on a similar theme from a different angle. He emphasizes that businesses (and individuals) must embrace discomfort and discipline to grow. He argues that:

•Growth requires constant stress and adaptation—which fights entropy by keeping systems evolving. Just like muscles grow stronger through resistance training, businesses and individuals only improve when they are exposed to controlled stress and adaptation. Without pressure, organizations settle into inefficiency, and people become stagnant. Growth isn’t a one-time event but a continuous cycle of pushing boundaries, adjusting, and pushing again. The moment this process stops, entropy takes over, and decline begins.

• Too much order kills innovation (think bloated corporations where nothing gets done). This is why many large, once-dominant companies eventually struggle—their own processes become the biggest obstacle to progress.

• But too much chaos leads to collapse (think of startups that scale too fast and implode). On the other extreme, some businesses resist structure entirely, running on pure instinct and speed. While this can work in the early stages, scaling without systems, processes, or clear decision-making frameworks creates confusion. Priorities shift constantly, people work in different directions, and growth outpaces control. The result? Mistakes pile up, execution falters, and the whole thing crashes under its own weight. Structure isn’t the enemy—too much or too little of it is.

Entropy is inevitable, but it’s not an excuse. The companies (and individuals) that resist it are the ones that build systems to continuously push against it.

Growth Strategies and Entropy

If entropy is the natural state of all systems, then fighting it requires a deliberate and ongoing effort. In business, this means designing systems that continuously resist decay while allowing for adaptation. Growth isn’t just about scaling; it’s about maintaining momentum in the face of inevitable disorder.

One of the most effective ways to counter entropy is through compounding. In physics, compounding appears in chain reactions, where small initial inputs generate exponentially larger effects over time. In business, compounding works similarly—incremental improvements, when sustained, create long-term durability.

Bezos captures this in the 2020 shareholder letter when he talks about high standards being teachable. His argument is that setting and reinforcing high expectations in an organization doesn’t just prevent decline—it compounds, creating a culture that resists entropy.

This idea of compounding applies beyond companies—it’s central to personal development as well. Growth is generated by focusing on stacking small, consistent efforts over time. Instead of chasing massive overnight wins, it’s easy to appreciate (yet very hard to execute!) the importance of refining and iterating processes, a mindset that directly counters entropy.

Compounding and decision speed are two of the most effective tools against entropy. The companies and individuals who sustain long-term success are not the ones who avoid disorder but the ones who build systems that actively fight against it every day.

Embracing Entropy

The fight against entropy is the price of staying in the game. Whether it’s career, relationships, or personal growth, stagnation isn’t an accident; it’s the default outcome unless you actively push against it.

And this is where the real challenge lies: entropy is comfortable. It’s the temptation to stick with what’s easy, to let things “just be.” It’s why businesses become slow and bloated, why talented people plateau, why relationships drift apart. No one wakes up one morning and decides to become irrelevant—it happens gradually, as the forces of entropy quietly take over.

The alternative is work. Not in the sense of hustle culture, but in the reality that staying sharp, staying engaged, staying in motion requires effort. The people who keep growing, the ones who still have energy and curiosity decades into their lives, are the ones who have learned to accept this reality.

This isn’t about having perfect discipline or always making the right decisions. It’s about recognizing that there is no steady state. The moment you stop putting in effort—whether in business, fitness, learning, or relationships—is the moment entropy starts winning.

I admit that I have re-read this post several times trying to change the tone, because I know this sounds like a cheap Instagram “life-coach” advice… but I swear the intent is not that. By no means I feel like I have this figured out, but the concept of entropy and the active work to try and fight it is something I often think about.

I often find myself in discomfort (for instance these weeks, where I am training for a marathon, and hating ALL the long runs!) and think about “why am I doing this to myself??”. But then the answer is always the same: once the run is done (or any other uncomfortable task) I ALWAYS feel better than before I started.

Progress feels good, that’s the truth. Understanding what progress means, in the many fields of life, and how to get it, is one of the key human questions that probably has no answer… isn’t it?

Hopefully this post just gives you something to think about… that’s the hope of all my posts to be honest!

Have a great Sunday!
Giovanni

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Book in a tweet

One of the most daring explorers of all time, stepping far beyond his comfort zone. This Thing of Darkness tells the story of Charles Darwin and his transformative journey of discovery.