it is unfortunate that there's no reason for most people to remember high school chemistry because the best analogy I have found for "the amount of energy that it takes me to initiate a task, which can be higher than the amount of energy it takes to actually complete the task" is "activation energy" and it's not precisely perfect but
yeah. and you can even include "thing that reduces the barrier to doing the task" as a catalyst/enzyme
anyway. unfortunately this does not actually clarify anything for the average person. but #ToMe it works
Maybe it's because I'm a medic but I never stopped referring to the effort I have to put in to do something as my activation energy.
You have to put in that extra energy and motivation to start it - but once you're going, it's not so bad.
And if you can't overcome that initial step of starting then it won't happen, even if it's almost trivial to do the task itself.
