The Zero Energy Principle Will Change Your Life Forever

How to build habits for effortless progress

Siddharth Chatterjee
5 min readSep 28, 2021

This year, I created a workout plan to go to the gym 4–5 days a week.

And I planned all the way. I got an accountability partner, a calendar to cross off days, made daily to-dos. But still, eventually I stopped going to the gym.

In the same year, I learnt to play the piano from scratch. Without ever wanting to.

How did I practice 80 hours of piano without wanting to, while failing miserably to do my carefully planned exercise routine?

The Counterintuitive Reason People Fail

You see, the habit you desire most is the one you fail the hardest.

The greater your desire to build a habit, the more pressure you feel to execute perfectly. But the more pressure you feel to execute perfectly, the less likely you are to set-up the habit so you can do it unconsciously (though imperfectly).

Author’s illustration

That’s a fatal mistake. And it is caused by neglecting Zero Energy Principle. Zero energy is the law that determines which practices…

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Siddharth Chatterjee

Writer-philosopher. Essays on modernity, creativity and the mind. Let’s build an internet for big ideas: siddharthchatterjee.com/email-list/