Summary: three things affect action. The pliable long-term solution is appealing to identity. Building relationships does this well.
“There were all these campaigns to try and get young people to quit smoking and they did not work. It’s going to give you lung cancer. This is your lungs after smoking. None of that worked. What worked was the ad campaign that had these old white dudes calling and talking about all the money they made on these young kids smoking.” – Andrew Huberman, June 2026
One of my biggest challenges teaching high school is action.
My 7th period last year was explosive. The question was could we harness that explosion to create energy.
Three avenues lead to action.
- Inertia. The ‘good’ kids show up, take notes, try hard-ish all on their own. The ‘bad’ kids are late, fall asleep, and change the subject.
Inertia just is. Your mind would be blown away by some of the high-action high-inertia kids. A friend at our graduation party texted me the day after saying her faith in humanity was restored. The other two avenues are:
- Short-term. Easy to use, middling effectiveness especially long-term. This is discipline, calls home, moved seats, extra credit, candy, real-life-examples-and-interestingness, detention.
- Long-term. The goal. Perfection. The target. Like lunar eclipses rare and beautiful.
In the same way short-term is easier to spin up so is information. If you don’t X then you won’t Y. It’s so shallow. But it’s easy and sometimes I just did it.
The best technique (so far) to get to the long-term and identity based action catalyst is through relationships. When I first started teaching it was all watch how fast we’ll go from day one and that has shifted to starting slower but going further. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.
See also: Don’t bring information to a design fight and Don’t bring educational solutions to a design fight.
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