Activation energy

You got to turn up the heat.

You need to hit that activation energy point where you are all in and you really see how these ideas can help you become the version of you that you aspire to be.

And then you're willing to actually do the work.

All of these ideas have to end in action.

So science says the same thing.

Your motivation is going to be dictated by how much you value something, how much you expect to actually see positive results from it.

And in the note, I talk about activation energy.

Have you ever heard of activation energy? It is a chemistry phrase, an idea, where basically one thing becomes another thing, right? So water moves from just being water to boiling at what point? The temperature needs to reach 212 degrees.

Or the products might physically separate and have little chance of colliding at all, like when products separate into solids and gases.

Often, though, it's just that the reverse reaction has such a high activation energy that the collisions are almost always ineffective.

Because, remember, most reactions don't happen instantly, boom, all at once.

Instead, they happen in steps.

And sometimes, that step is very slow indeed.

Since it's what controls how fast everything else can go, we call it the rate-limiting or rate-determining step.

The slowest step is the one that has the highest activation energy.

If the particles have trouble getting over that part of the energy hill, then they'll have trouble making it to the finish line, no matter how fast the other steps are.

You are fighting the literal status quo of your life.

The concept you're describing maps perfectly to a chemistry model known as activation energy.

Activation energy.

Yeah.

It's the minimum amount of energy required to kickstart a chemical reaction.

It perfectly describes the upfront cost of habit formation.

So the friction you feel on day three of a new diet isn't a lack of moral character.

It is just the activation energy tax.

And to truly understand why making the habit this microscopic is so effective, Farnam Street suggests we borrow mental models from physics.

Specifically, inertia, activation energy, and thermodynamics.

Applying literal physics to human behavior is kind of mind-bending, but it works perfectly.

Let's break them down.

Getting off the couch and putting on the running shoes is vastly harder than the actual jog itself.

Exactly.

And in chemistry, that initial effort required to spark a change is called activation energy.

It is the minimum threshold of energy required to start a chemical reaction.