The Valuable Friction We Should Keep

I just got back from Content Marketing World, and I keep thinking about how ridiculous events are.

You fly somewhere. Stay in a hotel. Walk around a convention center. Sit in rooms with hundreds of other people. Wait in lines. Miss sessions because a conversation runs long. From a pure efficiency standpoint, there are much easier ways to get information.

Especially today.

AI can summarize a presentation in seconds. It can pull out the key points from a book, podcast or keynote. It can tell you what you missed and probably give you a decent list of action items before you even leave the room.

So why go to events at all?

Maybe because the information isn’t the point.

At CMW, I had an impromptu lunch with Carmen Hill. I bumped into Melanie Deziel and had an incredible conversation about education and autism. I was talking with JK Kalinowski in the expo hall, which somehow turned into a conversation about Rush being in town, which eventually ended with us going to see them perform that night.

I planned none of those things, and yet those are some of the moments I’ll remember.

Maybe the friction is part of the value.

The Skills We Stop Using

I was thinking about this after listening to ​Trevor Noah’s podcast conversation with comedian Jimmy Carr​. Carr made a point that stuck with me: don’t outsource any skill you’re not comfortable losing.

That immediately made me think about running.

I stopped running entirely in 1991 and didn’t start again until 2007. Sixteen years is a long time to put a skill on the shelf, and when I finally came back to it, I could barely run a mile. It took me weeks just to get there without feeling like I was going to drop.

Today, I’ve now been running again longer than I wasn’t running. The skill came back, but I don’t get to keep it just because I earned it back. I have to keep running every week. If I stop, I lose some of it.

That seems obvious with something physical. But we don’t always think about our other abilities that way.

Writing. Thinking. Remembering. Creating. Navigating. Making decisions. Having difficult conversations. Working through a problem before immediately asking a machine what we should do.

The friction isn’t getting in the way of the skill. The friction is how we keep the skill.

Valuable Friction

My friend and podcast partner Robert Rose wrote a book called ​Valuable Friction​. His argument was not that friction is always good. A lot of friction is stupid and should absolutely be eliminated.

Nobody needs more paperwork. Nobody needs more unnecessary meetings.

But in our pursuit of speed and efficiency, we can accidentally remove the resistance that creates better thinking, better ideas and better decisions.

That idea feels even more important today.

AI is promising to remove friction from almost everything. Faster writing. Faster research. Faster analysis. Faster decisions. Faster creation.

And in many cases, it’s fantastic. Let it.

But maybe we need a better rule for deciding when to let technology handle something and when to keep doing the work ourselves.

Here’s mine:

Use technology to remove the work you don’t need to become better at. Be careful using it to remove the work that makes you better.

If the friction is administrative, automate it. Scheduling, formatting, transcription, repetitive research, data cleanup, expense reports. I am perfectly happy to lose those skills.

But if the friction is developmental, I want to be much more careful.

Writing a first draft. Learning a song. Remembering something before looking it up. Working through a difficult decision. Taking a walk without filling every second with a podcast. Cooking something that takes an hour instead of ordering it and eating in minutes.

And yes, continuing to run even when it would be much easier not to.

What Should Stay Difficult?

Before outsourcing something, maybe we should ask three questions.

If I stop doing this, will I lose a skill I value? Is the struggle itself helping me think, learn, connect or create? And if technology handles this perfectly, am I giving up something besides time?

If the answer is no, automate away. But if the answer is yes, maybe some of the friction is worth protecting.

We’ve spent decades believing that easier is always better. I immediately think the those “easy button” ads. I’m not sure that’s true anymore.

Maybe the question isn’t, “Can I make this easier?” Maybe the better question is, “What happens to me if I do?”

And maybe that’s why I’m still bullish on events.

I don’t need to fly somewhere to get information anymore. None of us do. But I might still fly somewhere because I can’t completely control what happens once I get there.

In a world increasingly designed to remove friction, maybe some of the most valuable things will be the things we intentionally refuse to make easier.

P.S.: ​A reminder that I’m giving away my book, Burn the Playbook, for free​. Please share it with a friend. I’m finding more and more parents are reading this and then sharing it with their kids.