Activation Energy is a good model for a lot of things

A thing I go back to from the book “Unf*ck Yourself” is a firm identification with things that you have set out to do early on. Rather than saying “I need to exercise.” instead “I exercise.” With that mindset adopted pretty quickly into your campaign any slacking is genuinely you no longer being yourself. A rejection of your identity is stronger activator than a spoken aspiration of a future self that does said thing. Identities are hard to shake.

I quite like the article, but I think it is missing reflection on what other common models are and why activation energy is more helpful.

In practice the model par excellence is the humble linear model - put a bit more effort in, get a bit more result out. Increase the widget budget by 10%, get 10% more widget. People seem to default to that sort of thinking quite readily.

And then obviously if someone applies linear thinking to a fire hazard they're going to get really bad results, because once enough energy has gathered to spark a flame, reducing the available energy by 10% is not going to be enough to get the situation back under control.

There are really important non-linear situations - many involving soft skills. Relationships, reputation, motivation and the like. Having a nonlinear model for them is quite important.

This reminded me one of PG's article about how to get started when you are not really feeling it on a certain day. You just tell yourself that you will go through what you have done yesterday for 10 minutes. That trick works wonderfully in most cases for me. This small trick, to some degree, helps with that activation energy to start working on what I want to work on.

A good person to have on a team is someone with high sensitivity and high activation energy. They’re the ones who notice it’s getting stuffy and open a window (or onboarding is a total pain and rewrite it, etc).

Except, of course, for economics, where the only way to spur growth is to increase the spoils for the victors and any suggestion that barrier reduction could be a good investment makes you dumb and wrong and anti-growth. Why are you anti growth? Don't you want to grow the economy?

(/s -- which is important to say, because this line of thinking isn't just common, it's consensus)

I have a trick for writing (I used to write tech books) where I allow myself to write one sentence of the current in-progress chapter instead of aiming for anything more. The activation energy for writing one sentence is so low that it's almost easier to do this than make excuses. Once you've written that first sentence... well, it wasn't unusual to sit down to write a sentence and write a couple of chapters instead.

I'm not saying I never found an excuse instead of writing ONE FEEBLE SENTENCE of the damn things, but tricking my stupid brain did work quite often.

when you want something to happen (more):

- increase energy for activation (motivation, habit, …)

- make obstacle lower (break it down, find an onramp, …)

sometimes one is easier than the other

other times working on both is what makes it happen