I.

I played a lot of Dwarf Fortress in high school.

For those of you who aren't familiar, Dwarf Fortress is a videogame where you try and manage a group of dwarves building a new settlement in the wilderness. It's legendary for a difficulty curve that resembled the Cliffs of Insanity, partially because it was a complex simulation of as many things as the developer could simulate and partially because of the opaque user interface. There were lots of ways to die in Dwarf Fortress, but the way that stuck with me the most was the anvil problem.

In Dwarf Fortress, your dwarves can craft mighty weapons and study armour, utilitarian buckets and elegant jeweled crowns, all the things you'd image fantasy smiths making by pounding away at an anvil in their forge. One of the things they could make on their forge was an anvil. If you didn't have an anvil, you couldn't craft an anvil. You were stuck.

By default your fortress started with an anvil, so this was never a problem. If you were messing around with the starting equipment however, you could remove that starting anvil in order to bring other equipment. I did this, and then after several hours realized my mistake. If you don't have an anvil, you can't craft an anvil, though you can sometimes get one by doing something much more complicated or roundabout. If you do have an anvil, then getting a second anvil is easy.

This is what I call the Anvil Problem.

II.

Here's some other examples.

• If you already have a fire, you can light another fire by putting a stick in your fire and carrying it somewhere else.
• If you already have a good car battery, you can start the car and charge the battery more.
• If you already have a tomato plant, you can grow a second tomato plant by taking the seeds of a tomato and burying them in the ground.
• If you have ADHD meds, you can focus on the paperwork the doctor requires for you to get ADHD meds.
• If you already have a car, you can drive to a job which gets you money for a car.
• If you already have a friend, you can make more friends by meeting their friends.
• If you already have an aligned artificial general intelligence, you can ask it to make you a second AGI. 

There's other ways to light a fire of course, but it's generally more complicated than poking a stick in the hot thing for a minute until the stick lights up. The point isn't that it's impossible to get an anvil if you don't already have an anvil. The point is that if you have an anvil, you can just make a second anvil, whereas if you don't have an anvil you have to trade for it with with a passing caravan. 

I use the Sazen "Anvil Problem" to refer to situations where the solution would be really easy, if you already had the solution. There's a few cases where having this label changes my decision making.

III.

First, knowing something is an Anvil Problem to get means that I highly prioritize keeping access to at least one anvil. I don't quit a job until I have a second job lined up, I keep in touch with friends so that I never have to cold-start the process of meeting people, and I don't run down all the gas in my car's gas tank. I also build my first forge in Dwarf Fortress quickly, lest goblins steal the anvil while it's undefended in a random stockpile.

Second, I'm often willing to prioritize and put much more effort into getting the first anvil than seems reasonable if one doesn't consider how much easier the second anvil will be. Getting my first tech job involved a lot of interview preparation and projects I could point to. Getting my second tech job involved a little interview prep, but I think a lot of the weight was carried by already having a few years and some good references.

Third, the Anvil Problem frame helps me react usefully to other people having things easier than I do.

I know some people who made more money from investments over the last three or four years than I did from my salary and working for it. Some frames of mind would get mad about that. There's several reasons I don't, but one is that having a million dollars is kind of like an anvil; once you have it, you can use that to get a second million easier than it is to get the first million. (Or so I'm told, and the math makes sense to me.)

And while this doesn't work with money, there's other anvil problems where (because the cost of getting a second anvil is so low) people are happy to share. Ask a baker with a good sourdough starter if you can use a split of their starter, and many will be happy to share. I used to play Minecraft, and while getting the first Nether Wart was an adventure, it was easy to farm a little and other people on the server could get seeds from me easier than going on their own adventure then grow their own.

IV.

Concrete suggestions:

1. Keep an eye out for anvils you're at risk of losing. Going from 1 to 0 is much worse than 2 to 1.
2. When you don't have an anvil, don't try to get one the way people with anvils get theirs. You might need a clever workaround.
3. One workaround is to ask someone who already has an anvil if they'll help you get your first.

Less concrete, but if you're struggling with something other people seem to find easy (or if you see someone struggling with something you find easy) then it might be worth looking and seeing if there's an anvil involved, something that would make the task easy and make getting more anvils easy but they're missing.

Anvils: don't Embark without one!