Activation Energy Explains Everything—From Fires to Friendships
Activation Energy is a good model for a lot of things
The author explores activation energy as a universal metaphor, from starting fires and moving furniture to neuron firing and friendship dynamics. They argue that many life situations—like initiating difficult conversations, exercising, or writing essays—are governed by the threshold of energy required to start versus sustain an activity. The piece encourages readers to spend a week viewing the world through this lens, examining what costs little or much energy, and where activation energies are set unexpectedly high.
There’s momentum coming out of basically anything, and you either sustain it, or it fades, and typically starting over from scratch requires much more effort than keeping it going.
- jmbwell
I forget where I read it but I have not forgotten that sometimes, a task reads as a threat. like, physiologically. Stack of unhandled tickets: menacing workload, guilt for being behind, internal judgment, fear of external judgment … fight or flight. Or difficult task: all the same things.
Or, and this was my own ah-ha moment: losing valuable context on where you are currently. Exiting one activity to start another, in the fear of losing progress and momentum on something you -did- manage to activate on. Not wanting to give up the -previous- victory over inertia.
So one of the many things I can try now (none of which ALWAYS work) is naming the physiological aspect. My body is recoiling as if I’m about to fight a bear. But do I actually see a bear? No. So shake it off
(And move on to the next procrastination complex…)
- roenxi
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.
- CompoundEyes
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.
- EagleEdge
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.
- chermi
Along the same lines, tanh-like curves describe a lot of shit across many domains, especially technology. Plateaus due to some fundamental limit, rapid rise after long slow start, then marginal gains become harder.
Both also follow from very simple physical/mathematical arguments. See strogatz book or ken dill's thermo book for example. I'm partial to energy landscape perspective for most everything. Free energy and entropy - entropy balance applies to more than you'd expect if you allow some liberty in interpretation