Birbla

Join the discussion

Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.

Sign in
  • Hacker News
  • > Some people get disproportionately large AE from negative stuff—they’re highly motivated to avoid bad outcomes. Others find that the big boosts come from positive, “toward” energy, visualizing the things that are exciting and happy.

    Oh look, it's Behavioral Activation (BA).

    by tonic_note
  • I have found satisfaction in thinking about activation multidimensionally (free energy surfaces). It lends the interpretation of reactants trying to escape gravity well-like local minima, crossing marginally more unstable transition states* to reach more stable global minima.

    *A misconception is that transition states are local maxima. They are first order saddle points: maxima along one direction but minima along every other direction.

    To drive a reaction forward, it doesn't always have to be lowering the transition state energy. Another technique is by destabilizing the resting state. In the analogy, the message would be: to not get too settled into one's comfort zone.

    by gw32
  • 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).
    by travisjungroth
  • 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.

    by dcminter
  • 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.
    by EagleEdge
  • 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.
    by CompoundEyes
  • 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.

    by roenxi
  • 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…)

    by jmbwell

Explore Birbla archives