The Action Potential
Published:
Also published on Substack.
In neuroscience, an action potential is the moment a neuron crosses its electrical threshold and fires. Below that threshold, nothing happens. Signals accumulate, energy builds, but the neuron remains silent. Above it, the signal propagates through the entire system.
Human lives seem to follow a similar pattern.
Many people accumulate knowledge, ideas, and ambition. The potential is there. But they never cross the threshold where intention becomes action. The difference is not talent. Not intelligence. Not circumstance.
The difference is agency.
The Skill That Cannot Be Replaced
Every few years, people ask a version of the same question: What skill should I learn to stay relevant? The answer keeps shifting, first it was coding, then data science, then AI. The anxiety is real. But I think the question is wrong.
The most durable skill is not technical. It is not domain-specific. It cannot be automated, outsourced, or made obsolete by the next wave of tools. It is the capacity to identify what needs doing and begin, without being told, without waiting for conditions to be perfect, without needing external permission to take the next step.
That capacity is agency.
Automation replaces tasks. It replaces steps in a workflow. It replaces anything that can be specified clearly enough to be handed to a system. What it cannot replace is the judgment to notice that something needs to exist, the initiative to start it, and the adaptability to keep going when the path changes. Those are irreducibly human, and they all flow from agency.
I want to be precise about what agency actually is, because the word gets used loosely. It is not confidence. It is not ambition. It is not the willingness to work hard. You can have all three and still be deeply passive, still be waiting for someone to define the problem, assign the task, and confirm the direction.
Agency is the tendency to initiate. To move the first brick, not knowing exactly what lies beneath it, because you have decided that not knowing is not a good enough reason to stand still.
Agency is an Iteration and Not Just an Action
Here is where I think most people stop short. They hear “agency” and they think it means starting things. And yes, starting matters enormously. But the people I have watched compound the fastest are not simply people who start. They are people who iterate.
The difference is everything. Anyone can start a company, begin writing, or launch a project. The differentiator is what happens after the first failure. And there will always be a first failure. High-agency people treat that failure as information. The hypothesis was wrong. Good. Update the model. Try again. That loop of act, observe what breaks, adjust, act again, repeated without external validation, often without visible progress for weeks, is where real compounding begins.
“It’s not that important to be smart. It’s much, much more important to be determined.” - Paul Graham
Treat Your Life as an Experiment
Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff introduced a reframe that made this concrete for me. Her argument: most people approach their lives as a series of permanent, high-stakes decisions. Choose the right path. Get it right the first time. The weight of this framing creates paralysis because the cost of being wrong feels catastrophic.
What if you treated it as a sequence of small experiments instead?
An experiment cannot fail in the traditional sense. It can only produce data. If it confirms your hypothesis, you have a result. If it doesn’t, you have something equally valuable. You now know what doesn’t work, which is one step closer to knowing what does. The frame change is quiet but radical. It transforms every setback from a personal indictment into a scientific output. It makes action less costly. And it makes starting the first version, the rough, imperfect, too-early version, feel like exactly the right thing to do. Because it is.
Form a hypothesis and not a plan
A testable guess. “If I do this specific thing for this specific period, I will learn whether this direction is worth pursuing.” Not a ten-year commitment. A four-week test.
Design the smallest version
Not the right version. The cheapest version that can still falsify the hypothesis. One prototype. Ten conversations. A month of output. Shrink it until you can no longer justify not starting.
Run it imperfectly, on purpose
Perfectionism is resistance wearing the costume of standards. The data from a flawed experiment that ran beats the data from a perfect one that never launched. Every time.
Extract the signal from what broke
What do you know now that you didn’t before? Which assumption turned out to be wrong? The answer to those questions is the input for the next experiment. Begin again.
Where to Begin
If any part of this resonates, the starting point is probably smaller than it feels.
Most of the time, we are not stuck because we lack ideas, information, or even motivation. More often, we are waiting for clarity, for confidence, for the moment when things feel ready enough to begin.
The people who move forward don’t necessarily have more certainty. They simply become comfortable treating the first version as a probe rather than a commitment.
A small attempt, a rough prototype, or a short run of effort just to see what happens is often enough to generate the first real signal.
Once something exists even imperfectly, it becomes much easier to improve, adapt, or abandon with better information than we had before.
So the practical starting point is rarely dramatic. It’s usually something modest: trying a small version of the idea, running a short experiment, or simply putting the first piece of work into the world.
From there, the loop begins: Act → See what happens → Adjust → And then repeat.
But crossing that first threshold can’t be trivialized. The first step often feels heavier than it should. It demands effort without proof, persistence without immediate reward, and belief before the results exist. That is precisely why many people stop just before it. The potential builds, but the signal never fires.
And that is also why not everyone ends up doing the things they aspire to.
Crossing that threshold, triggering the first action potential, requires a willingness to move before certainty arrives.
Which is why this thought from Prof. Randy Pausch has always stayed with me:
The brick walls are there for a reason. The brick walls are not there to keep us out. The brick walls are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something. Because the brick walls are there to stop the people who don’t want it badly enough. They’re there to stop the other people.