Slaughter the Friction before Friction kills the Action

So you’re going to take action that will make you awesome, like making cold calls to mining experts to fish for leads. You picked a time, a date, your phone is charged, you got a name and a phone number, nothing will stop you this time!

The time comes and goes, and you never made the call.

What happened?

Something got in the way, and that something is what we call friction.

Friction is anything that delays the completion of an action. In the case above, maybe it was that you couldn’t come up with a good sales pitch. Maybe you wore yourself out coming up with ways to overcome rejections. Maybe you needed to find a quiet place to make the call, but spent all day wandering around town. (I have done all three of these.)

Whatever it was, some activity YOU did prevented the action from happening.

We’re going to look today at how to identify sources of friction, and how to remove them, so there is nothing standing between you and success.

The Source of Friction

When you decide to start practicing some periodic action, from brushing your teeth twice a day to writing out your daily morning pages, there is always a force that will prevent you from doing that action.

I count two main reasons that make it hard to slip a new action into your day.

1. Fear

Fear is the biggest factor that keeps me from taking action. For example, I get panic attacks before talking to new people. That’s the main reason I (and others) have yet to make cold calls.

But the friction doesn’t present itself as fear. It presents itself as extra steps added between now and the target action. When I’m planning to make a call, I tend to think I need a fully worked out script, including responses to objections. I’ll spend an hour fighting with that script, then boom, no calls.

2. Routine

Your daily routine comes with inertia. It’s not easy to just throw something else in there.

I think the daily routine is a human adaptation to living in a world. The daily routine can be done mostly on autopilot. This allows you to think about other things, instead of constantly considering “what do I need to do next?”

But whatever the origin of the daily routine, your daily activities tend to fill all the available space of that day, like a gas. There’s rarely an hour in there where you’re staring at the wall thinking “wow, I wish I could fill this time with a new activity!”

More likely, if you’re a grown up like myself, that hour is really only about five minutes long, and taken up by a well-needed break.

Identifying Friction

Now that we know whence the friction comes, let’s find all the points of friction in the way.

For example, exercising every day takes a lot of time out you could be doing other things. It makes you sweaty, so you need to shower afterwards. You don’t want to exercise on a full stomach or you’ll barf, so you need to time your eating an hour before, or maybe get up earlier than usual to do it in the morning. But, that would mean going to bed earlier, which means rearranging the schedule the evening before.

That’s a heavy lift, and a lot of it is unnecessary. But exactly which parts are the friction?

Here’s a method for identifying what is friction versus necessary actions.

First, list out the steps it takes to complete the target action.

1. Get a gym membership
2. Design a workout routine
3. Schedule an hour for the workout
4. Put on workout clothes
5. Grab a bottle of water
6. Hop in the car
7. Drive to the gym
8. Go into the gym
9. Work out
10. Drive back home
11. Take a shower

Second, identify the target action itself. The important step here is number 9 – Work Out!

Look all those steps before step 9!

Third, examine the other steps. Friction has a smell. That smell is “this could take forever”. Anything with that smell is friction

Step one was to get a gym membership. Imagine how long it would take to find a gym, compare membership plans, compare amenities, and so on. You could spend forever on step one.

Do you really need a gym membership to begin exercising? Maybe you can come up with a different set of exercises you can do at home.

Notice also, the gym membership actually comprises several steps – 1, 6, 7, 8, and 10. That is a lot of work for a requirement that is not the target action.

The gym membership is friction.

How about step 2, coming up with the routine? This could certainly be friction, if a “routine” in your mind is more elaborate than running around the neighborhood and doing some push-ups. You could take a long time trying to develop a routine, and never actually get to the exercising part.

Step 2 is friction.

How about step 3, scheduling? Even this could take a while, if your calendar is a mess. This is seems like friction, but it’s not really a step that can be avoided. Maybe it can be reduced.

Step 3 is also friction.

Or step 4, workout clothes. Maybe you don’t have any. You need to either drive to the store and find some, or do some online shopping. Personally, any activity I pick that starts with “buy appropriate clothes” is unlikely to happen. I take forever picking clothes unless I’m in a special state of mind. But maybe this isn’t a big deal for you.

Step 4, friction.

Even step 5 could be a point of friction. Maybe you don’t have a bottle. Maybe you’re nuts, and think you need special water from the health food store. That’s going to steal time and momentum to solve!

Whether or not some step can be dragged out ad infinitum depends on you. You may already have those exercise clothes, or a water bottle you’ve been hoping to take out for a run. One person’s friction could be someone else’s fuel.

Rely on that smell of bad infinity to identify what is truly friction.

Next, we decide what to do with all these smelly pressure points.

Kill All Sacred Cows

If you’re serious about your target action, then you need to be serious about eliminating the friction. You can always add some additional steps back in, but only after that target action itself has been established as part of your routine.

All points of friction can either be completely eliminated, or shrunk to an almost trivial action.

In the above example, you need to get down to maybe one or two steps before the exercise step. You don’t need the gym membership. Skip your lunch break tomorrow, wear your jeans and dress shoes, and exercise at home – whatever you absolutely need to do to have zero space left between you and the workout.

Wait, wear jeans to exercise?

Yes. If your target action is to exercise, then EVERYTHING that gets in the way can be friction. For example, how stupid would it be for you to die a few years early just because you were stuck picking exercise clothes, and could never get to the actual exercising!

You need to look at all intervening steps as sacred cows that should be sent to the slaughter. You don’t have a pair of shorts? How bad would it really be to take your oldest pair of pants, the ones you don’t even wear anymore, hack off the legs, and just run in those?

There used to be a crazy marathon in Australia, where the competitors run from Sidney to Melbourne, a distance of 544 miles. Back in 1983, the world record was beaten by almost two whole days! The new record holder wasn’t a high performer funded by Red Bull and Nike. He was a farmer. He ran the race in his work boots and overalls, beating the other runners by over 10 hours.

Do not let the sacred cow stand between you and success.

Do it!

In summary, if you’re having trouble getting from now to target action, do the following:

1. List the steps to accomplish the target action.
2. Identify where that target action is in the list.
3. Interrogate all the other steps as potential friction.
4. For each step, ask yourself if it smells like “this could take forever”.
5. Imagine how to complete the target action if each other step is removed.
6. If you absolutely can’t remove a step, shrink it to something trivial to complete.

Next time you find yourself unable to accomplish what you set out to do, interrogate yourself for friction. Assume you’re either scared or battling inertia, and find all those steps in between now and the target action. And gut them.

You can do it.

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