Activation energy in my daily life

I’ve found that activation energy is a useful concept to think how much effort to put to different recruitment processes. Without a doubt the hardest part is to get past screening—especially if you have no established connections at the company. As the hit rate is relatively low in the screening stage, it is not worth much to perfect the cover letters for each company. My approach has lately been to pick 1 company a week that I’m very excited about and draft a truly unique cover letter to them, and more or less send a templated version to every other not-so-interesting company. This I think is the best use of my energy, increasing the odds of getting past the first “bump” of finding a new job with the companies I find the most interesting. After the first bump, the next phase is usually a short screenign call—these I have found to be relatively straightforward. Low bumps, if you may. Questions are quite standard, and there is not much you can do to increase the odds of getting past to teh next stage. If you match the profile the company is looking for and there is no red flags coming up in the call, you most of the times go forward. After screening, the next bump is most of the times a take-home assignment. This requires quite a bit of effort, so at this point I have also turned one company down, as I didn’t see myself working at this company, saving my energy for a couple of other interesting companies and their processes. In terms of the stage where my own effort matters the most, I would say it has been at this stage. After getting past this stage, the rets of the process is more or less downhill, as it is more about cultural fit and practicality checks. Naturally things can go sour here as well, but it is less likely. Now that I’m at the end of the process, I might recap how the whole journey looks like from activatio energy perspective. So the “meaningful change” I’m after is to find a job I enjoy, and convince that company that I would be valuable for them as well. This is not one step, but a multiple steps: first to get past screening, second to get past screening call, third to excel in take-home assignment or experience/skill assessment done some other way, and last to not mess up in cultural/velue assessment stages. Not every process is the same, and in some cases the bumps are differnt and one approaches the “pek” from a different angle. You might for example go the “warm introduction” route, if you know somebody who knows somebody. Then the initial bump is not to get past screening, but to find that person who knows somebodu, and initiate the intor. There is many times social capital involved, so one needs to think whom to ask (and why, exactly). In this cae though, it’s funny that even if somebody turns down making an intro (e.g. I don’t know her so well), you are not doomed: you can still apply. So the route and bumps along the way just changes, the peak stays the same regardless of how you decide to approach things. I should have probably mentioned this in my newsletter, but hey that’s life.

Okay we still have time so moving on to something else. Waking up in the morning. I’ve been getting better at it, but to really wake up still requires quite a few things: going to sleep early enough, waking up to the first alarm, and drinking a cup of coffee andeasing into the day by reading something (like the news). Here I like to think that the “enough sleep” part is like “charging the battery” for the expendabe energy to use to get over the initial bump of getting out of bed. If there is not enough energy in the battery, it’s a hopeless exercise. I have ofund that I need 9 hours of sleep every night, otherwise it’s tough.

What else could we have where activation energy applies? Writing the newsletter. It feels straightforward—jjust put down some words and press send, but oh boy it’s full of close-to-paralysing intermediate steps. What to write about? What do I have to say abotu this? Why should I write about these? Does anybody care? How should the text look like, should there be pictures? What if nobody opens? These are not steps, but more like forces holding me back from getting started to begin with. I have found that I need around half an hour to really force myself to look at the text editor to start getting any even remotely publishable text out from me. It’s sad, but that’s how it is (at least right now). I’m confident, though, that I’ll find routines and a certain style to start writing a newsletter. First one is always the hardest, I guess.

But anyways, I find myself struggling seeing that there is still two minutes to go writing. I’m almost there, trying to push myself over the bump. Thinking about this, I might change the assignment to ne only 15 minutes, this 20 munutes is actually quite a bit. And judging the words here (even if I’m not supposed to do it), it’s hard to argue this can be said to be any progress. But on the other hand, I have to say I have gotten a couple of new perspectives to the topic of “activation energy”, especialyl the “approach the hill from many different angles”. Another thing, now to think of it, could be that one can also consciously “flatten the curve” in addition to breaking down big hills to small hills. But the question is, does the total amount of effort also reduce then? Or are you just deferring more effort to the future? Haven’t read about this anywhere, James Clear wrote about flattening the curve (start new habits aasy in the beginning), but not in the intermdeiate steps part. Have to check this out later and try to find something.

10 seconds to go, over and out.