Activation Energy is a good model for a lot of things

For me, filing taxes and dealing with medical bills take a LOT of extra effort to overcome my dislike of these tasks. Not because of having to pay money - but because in the past I experienced a large amount of real physical pain doing these tasks when I had hand and shoulder problems.

Even things like filing receipts for reimbursement feels similar enough that I procrastinate, even though I'm going to get money back. Brains are weird things.

It seems like you have fought procrastination and put some real thought and effort into it.

Do you have any other recommendations like books to read or strategies you have tried?

I love this take. You hear a lot about non-linearity dynamics of complex systems in academia and even more practically in conceptualizing commonplace phenomena we tend to interpret linearly or assume it’s governed by complete chaos. but I could see how it underlies many soft skills as you ascribed. Do you happen to have any reading recs on the topic in this domain ?

Another model: nihilism. Putting in 10% more effort isn't going to achieve enough to be worthwhile, so it's short-term at best and ultimately pointless, so why bother doing anything at all?

Or closely related: I'll call it inertia. The belief that anything I do will only provide benefit as long as I keep it up, and the minute I lose vigilance, the benefit will drain away.

Another: certitude. I am fundamentally a godlike being and whatever I choose to spend effort on is the Right thing, whether I understand why or not, and therefore whatever I am doing is critically important to keep doing regardless of actual or perceived benefit.

Another: diminishing returns. Initial effort brings outsized rewards, but later effort becomes less effective over time.

Another: compound interest. 10% effort initially doesn't achieve much, but the longer I keep at it, the more the benefits compound. (This one is interesting, in that it can lead to positive behavioral changes yet is, in a way, the opposite of the activation energy model.)

Another: behaviorism. Effort doesn't matter, only observable outcomes. There's no point in doing things that have no short-term visible effects.

Related: momentum. (Also note that it's a synonym of inertia!) I need to do things where I can feel the success, in order to fuel the next thing, and then the next.

Meta-model: optimization (aka desperation). There is no single right model, and so I need to choose a different model for each situation, and it's critically important that I choose the best one.

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I doubt the activation energy model dominates[1] all of the above, but it very well may be the best one to focus on. At least for a time, as the author suggested at the end of the article.

[1] Is better in all circumstances.

> There are really important non-linear situations

I would even say that most things in life (including life itself) are non-linear. Exponential growth and decay, homeostasis, sigmoid curves, hysteresis, quadratic and other higher order curves, sine and other waves, Gaussians, etc. Linear relationships are more the exception than the norm.

This is also central in the book Atomic Habits.

identities spoken of in this way are tools and we often get very caught up in self reflection and the level of worthiness we feel we have earned certain labels. your true and actual identity is out of your control and not something you would ever think twice about. you arent someone who exercises or not. your identity is the part of you that believes exercising is good for you to begin with. thinking you need to and telling yourself you are someone who does it are both the same identity. If you believe it is good for you and you dont do it, then there is another part of your identity that is asserting you dont always need to good things for yourself.

The part you really need to challenge, which will help in all areas of your life, is to settle the question: "to what extent do I believe I should do things that are good for me?". Every day you go without any plan or committed effort towards your health and exercising is a day you answered, "very little extent". for sake of text length im going to skip a lot of detail, but if you're like me then this eventually leads to a question of "how do I restore faith in myself?"

a thought experiment that i read somewhere (and maybe tweaked) that i use is a "post body swap" mentality. If you are willing to accept accountability and responsibility for whatever is in your past, then you no longer need to identify with it, and can treat every single new day as if it is your first time in this body. A kind of "live every day like it's your first" mentality. It has helped me recover from a lot of tough spots where i had an overwhelming amount of 'backlog' to deal with.

phrased differently, you look at your life as if you have just inherited it. you died, met God, and He said "i dont normally do this, but im sending you back for another shot in a random <yours> body".

the point isnt to trick yourself, you dont need to, there is no trick. it is simply a reminder of the free will you had already possessed prior to the thought experiment. that this is always your life to live however you want moving forward.

imagine you woke up in someones body who is more out of shape than you are currently, to the point you cant do things you currently enjoy doing. would you take the obvious path to start training to at least be able to do the things you were previously used to doing and see how far you get, or would you put in work to figure out how to change the way you live to better fit the new body?

your life is the way it is right now largely due to momentum from your past, not your current identity. identity updates really are not necessary to improve your life, and you arent identified by your momentum - even if that momentum has labels people use to describe it

I find the failure mode for this to have been pretty insurmountable when you’re not genuinely on board with said identity. A trivial example: the behavior you could make into your identity is the result of socionormative expectations and pressure. Doctors say one should exercise, all my friends are athletic and expect me to be, society values fitness, to espouse the exercise lifestyle is seen as a moral virtue, etc.—but what if someone personally doesn’t give a fvck about exercise beyond these external forces? For some people it will never naturally become their identity, even if they “want” it to be, on account of the exogenous pressure to fit this norm. For some it will feel contrived or even forced. It is possible for the inherent motivation to act in accordance with your identity, and how you choose to orient yourself in the world, to be at odds with what you “want” to accomplish, do, or identify with on the surface. For that person, they have to genuinely value being the person who exercises for the “need” to become implicit.

For me this manifested on the intellectual plane. At times in the past I wanted to intellectually be “into XYZ”, like mathematics, for example, or some other subject matter. I had the aptitude and certainly the capacity to focus, enough to develop genuine expertise over time. But then I found that, in truth, I did not genuinely enjoy the subject matter enough to delve so deeply. I liked the idea of being someone who had cultivated rigorous mathematical expertise, but not actually being that person in reality, so it could never be my identity naturally, it would remain maximum effort as long as that were true.

It’s strange to me how we can convince ourselves to want something we don’t actually value intrinsically. But I suspect that’s a longstanding feedback loop in evolutionary psychology.

On the converse side of the story, I posit you can also get pretty far in stagnation of actual personal growth / progress by simply convincing everyone around you deceptively of a specific identity, and have that be validating enough to preclude cultivating that identity in earnest. Another trivial example: the “smartest guy in the room” effect. If you are sufficiently smart, or surround yourself with individuals who won’t challenge you intellectually and default to being deferential, you can certainly feel pretty smart, and have that maladaptively/falsely validate your sense of identity as the smartest-in-the-room type of personality.

TL;DR: I think the “make it your identity, then effort towards action comes naturally” is a powerful model for self-motivation, but it has meaningful failure modes—notably, it’s hard to force if you’re not genuinely into it, and sociodynamic feedback loops impacting personal sense of identity can collapse or even pervert the entire approach.

I benefit tremendously from the exercise example specifically, but I still agree with 0xf8 that this isn't something you can just will yourself into. I identity as an athlete because I am. I've played sports of some sort and exercised my entire life. It isn't "exercise" to me. I'm just an animal that has a body, wants that body to excel at being a body, and so I train it, just as I read and learn and practice various intellectual skills to keep my mind sharp, because it is also core to my identity that I'm a human, the apex of intelligence in the animal kingdom, and making my brain work as well as it possibly can is important to me. Making the rest of my body work well is also important to me.

On the other hand, I buy all of the data suggesting religious people are happier than others. They have built-in community, friends, relationships, guidance on how to live a good life. I was religious as a teenager and it was terrific. I had a great time in bible study, met interesting people I loved, even met girls and had an outlet for my singing. But as I got older, I can't do it any more because I don't believe the doctrine. I can't force myself to believe something I don't believe. In spite of how much better I believe my life would be if I was religious, I can't be.

I don't know that identity is really all that malleable. You either identity as something or you don't, and the reason is rarely if ever "I read a self help book and convinced myself this is who I am."

Link to said PG article?

I occasionally internally yell "dopamine!" and get up to do the thing I'm supposed to.

Am I thinking about activation energy wrong? This seems like a description of a person with low activation energy to me?

I'm glad to find someone who shares this perspective. Sigmoids show up everywhere (e.g. elo). One big area is AI ability. Coding agents have gone from completely unreliable to quite reliable at basic tasks.

Maybe this could be true about practiced abilities in general. For example, at some point circus entertainers must go from almost never succeeding to succeeding enough to put their lives at stake. It seems that at a certain point, with enough practice or intelligence, you reach a critical threshold where success rate switches from almost never to almost certain.

And I am also a big fan of potential energy surfaces - it always seemed like a huge upgrade going from crude 1D to multi-dimensional reaction coordinates. A big conceptual shift for me was to learn that transition states are not maxima, but first order saddle points.

Though I do wish I could have a better grasp on entropy's role. Also for example PES's connection to diffusion models and flow matching

oops meant energy - entropy balance

"Robot mode"

I often think of this as "attacking from both ends" (although I wonder how often this binary framing causes me to miss OTHER interventions that would help). Eg. when I was aiming to do 10 pull ups - gain strength and lose weight. Trying to build my savings, save more and spend less, etc.

This seems like a very hyperbolic simplification of what economics minded people think and say.