I don't buy it. It simplifies motivation down to a boolean. BJ Fogg teaches a Persuasion Techniques course at Stanford. His model describes the threshold at wh

I don't buy it. It simplifies motivation down to a boolean. BJ Fogg teaches a Persuasion Techniques course at Stanford. His model describes the threshold at which a person will perform an action as a curve on a motivation / difficulty chart. Persuasion (the act of making someone else more likely to do something) requires reducing the difficulty of that thing, increasing the motivation of the person, or both. If the guy might be interested in programming (or just being able to make a living for himself), perhaps having a mentor lowers the difficulty enough to put him over his threshold.