No, you're right, but it's really the ambiguity of language.

Activation energy is the energy required to trigger a result. You can read that two different ways: either as the threshold, or as the energy required to reach the threshold.

They are sadly opposites. When used to describe a person: are they high activation energy in that it takes a lot to get them going, or are they high activation energy in that they frequently do things that are hard to get started on?

I was confused for half a sec also, as someone who often finds I will do anything other than what I need to be doing

I think it’s meant to be an example of a more, “see problem → fix problem” kind of approach

The number of times when something minor has been suboptimal, like a TV being on a dumb channel or an appliance beeping or something on the floor being in the way, and just … nobody wants to do anything about it when it would take mere seconds to deal with it…

I think activation energy is real for most people. It’s certainly very real for me

I was using it in a way not totally compatible with the article and that was misleading. I think of the activation energy in a person as what flows out, what overcomes the activation energy of a task.