Summary
Have you ever started doing something you knew you were supposed to do and then gave up because it was too hard?
Of course you have, we all have, and the number one reason why is something called “Friction.” Friction keeps you doing what you don’t want to do and prevents you from doing what you do want to do because it adds little roadblocks that keep you from changing.
In this video, I’m going to go over more about what friction really is and the practical steps to remove it so that you give up less and get more of the important things done, as well as stop bad habits.
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Transcript
How to Be More Productive
You want to feel like every time you try to actually get something done or make it to the gym or do those new habits that you said you would do, you just keep getting bogged down by things.
Maybe a family member needs something from you. There’s too much traffic. There’s just too much effort involved to actually get the thing done. Because the truth of matter is if we want to do something consistently one way or another, it has to be incredibly easy to do.
So today we’re going to talk about one of the number one success killers in the thing that you need to get rid of. If you want to get what you want in life, let’s get into it.
A couple of years ago, I was talking about a new martial arts gym with my sister and I was talking about how it was too far across town. And so I didn’t want to sign up for that. I wanted to find a new gym and she said something like you’re so lazy.
And this is a fundamental misunderstanding of successful people. Sometimes people look at anybody who’s achieving great things. You will see that they’ve been able to enact what I’m about to tell you in their life. So if we’re looking at a gym that’s far across town, it is not a matter of laziness or not. It is a matter of pragmatism.
Will I consistently go to this gym every single day? If there’s going to be traffic jams, it’s going to take me a long time to get there. I have to get in my car and drive across town.
And the answer is I’ll probably get there the first week when I’m still excited about it. And I’m committed what will happen the second week when life gets busy, I’m going to start skipping days, maybe just one at first and then another.
And pretty soon, I’m not going to that gym at all anymore. And I’ve just given up on my martial arts training. So this is what’s called friction. Friction is the impediment to actually going out there and doing the thing that you want.
So if you’re trying to get to the gym every day, it’s the time that it takes you to get to the gym. It’s looking for your gym clothes when they’re stuck in the washer or the dryer, and having that make you wait 20 minutes for them to be done.
And then before, you know, you ran out of time to go to the gym is trying to find your gym shoes when you’re not sure where you left them, that is friction and exists in every part of our lives, especially in business.
I mean, think about just shooting a YouTube video like this. If I have to charge the camera because I forgot to charge the battery, that is friction. If I have to go look for the tripod, cause I’m not sure where I left it.
If my microphone isn’t already set up, if I have to change the audio settings, the chances of me consistently doing something are so much lower. And so if we want to do something consistently over time, we want to remove all of that friction.
Productivity Hacks (Friction)
So I’ll ask a friend if they’ve been through a certain part of a training program and I’ll see them try to pull it up on their phone. And they’re just guessing the URL in their browser. And they’re trying to find their login. They have no idea where it is. It’s not saved in a bookmark folder. It’s not easy to access.
That is more friction. And this is what’s going to hold you back from success. Now, the way that we deal with this is one, we have to define what exactly is going, get us what we’re looking for.
So again, if we’re looking in business, we need to know what are the daily activities we have to undertake to have success. So that could be going through training every single day. That could be prospecting. That could be the certain sites that we have to visit to get our work done.
And we want to make sure all of those things are as easy as possible. So number one thing you want to do on your computer is just literally clean up your bookmarks folder. Get rid of all the things that you’re not using, and then create really organized folders with all the things that you need to do every single day.
So that when you’re trying to get to that log into that course, guess what is one click away? It’s not you searching for the login, not remembering the URL for getting your password.
And before you know it, you’ve given up on actually educating yourself for the day. So the easier we can make a habit, the more likely we are to do it. Famous example of this is if you want to go to the gym in the morning, put your gym clothes and your shoes right next to your bed.
So that when you roll out of bed in the morning, you don’t have to look for them. There’s no friction involved. And all you do is you put on those clothes and you get to the gym because as we know, the hardest part of going to the gym is usually just showing up once we’re there.
It’s not that hard to do it. As an example, I just put a $10,000 gym in my house. Now, even if it’s 10 o’clock at night and I’ve missed my workout for the day, I can go, Oh, you know, I still have a couple minutes.
Maybe I should go work out. The amount of friction involved to go to the gym is almost zero. I just walked down the stairs. I walked into the gym and it’s perfectly set up for what I need.
Another thing you can do, if you have too much life admin life admin is maybe one of the biggest waste of time and the biggest source of friction for most of us like going grocery, shopping, cleaning our houses, doing all these things.
And I remember when I was a kid, I heard someone’s Cole, a rich person, lazy for having a professional landscaper come over and do their yard work.
But what they didn’t consider is this rich person might be rich because they spend their time doing what they’re good at operating in their zone of genius.
And they let other people take care of all that friction in their life that gets in the way of doing those things. So yes, it costs money to have your groceries delivered.
But what does it cost you to go and have to do that yourself in terms of friction? Yes. It costs money to have somebody clean your house. What does it cost you to be stressed out about your messy kitchen when you could be delivering value to your customers?
So you have to start to think in terms of opportunity costs, what does it cost you to have this friction in your life and how much more would you be able to accomplish if you didn’t have the friction?
How much more awesome would you go to the gym? If you had an amazing gym that you loved in your house, right?
How much more would you meditate if the meditation cushion is right next to your bed and when you wake up, you just roll out, you sit down, you have a timer and you get it done.
So this is all about making your habits as easy as possible. Now, in order to do this with new habits, we want to do a lot less than we think we should.
So most of us jump into new habit and we want to just go full force into it. And that’s a horrible idea because sustainability and consistency is always going to be your key to success. So if we want to go to the gym and we haven’t been going, why don’t we just go for 10 minutes the first day?
Cause we might go for an hour and get a really good workout in the next day. We’re too sore to do it again. And all of a sudden we stopped going altogether. So let’s do, what’s completely manageable.
If we’re trying to learn to meditate, let’s not start with 20 minutes a day. Let’s start with one minute a day. Because what that does is it actually makes it harder to not do the habit.
And then to actually do it, if it’s easier just to do the habit than to not do it, then we’re pretty consistently going to do it. So that’s one way to remove friction.
How to Stop Bad Habits
The next thing is we can remove bad habits out of our life to clear up space for the good ones.
And what we do is we add friction to the bad habits. So this is like, if you’re eating too much junk food, put the junk food away in a cabinet.
That’s really hard to reach maybe above your fridge where you don’t normally go.
And so it is remarkable how little friction is actually required to get you to stop doing a bad habit. If you can’t stop smoking cigarettes, go put the cigarettes out in a lockbox in the garage.
And you have to actually consciously go through the act of unlocking this box and acknowledge to yourself that you’re breaking your promise, not to engage in this bad habit.
How to Use Automation to Improve Success
Another thing we can do to remove friction and make sure that we do the things we want to do is use automation.
So let’s say that we want to save a certain amount every single month in our business, or put it away for taxes. Now we could go through the friction of logging into our bank account every month, uh, searching our income for the month, finding out how much we want to put away, manually transferring it to that account.
But as you can see, there’s a lot of friction there. What if we just set up an automated rule that says transfer $5,000 a month into my tax account and we set it up once and we never have to look at it again.
So oftentimes we can design a system that will remove all the friction from the tasks we need to complete. You know, one of the easiest ways to do this is just hire somebody put in a good SOP. And then that person is actually taking care of this task for you.
And it’s removed all the friction of doing this, right? So I urge you to put in the hard work of designing the system. First, spend that time, sharpening the ax. If you have five hours to cut down a tree, spend four and a half hours sharpening the ax. And when you actually go to do the thing, it’s just going to be automatic.
And then the next tree is going to be even easier. So friction or all these little things that add up, you know, looking for that log into your course, uh, trying to get to the sites where you do your prospecting, trying to get to the gym when it’s across town.
And you have to sit in traffic trying to meditate when you don’t know where you’re going to do it, when you’re going to do it, how long you’re going to do it for, we can remove all of this by just designing really simple systems, removing all the friction and making it as simple as possible.
So the more you remove the friction, the more you set up your camera set up ahead of time. Whereas in a permanent situation, my microphone is always here. My camera’s always there. It’s always charged as plugged in. I know exactly what I can do to shoot a video.
I sit down, I shoot it. There’s no friction involved. That’s what’s going to actually get me to do a habit consistently over time.
So it’s not about laziness. It’s about removing things that get in the way of the processes that you need to do to have success. So this is what we have to do in life to consistently achieve new habits, remove friction from the good ones, add friction to the bad ones and start very small. And over time, all of this will become automatic.
I hope this helps go out there. Use automation, make things easier whenever possible, take off the tasks that aren’t adding value to your lives. Remove the friction.
You’re going to start to see success with those habits and processes that actually produce the outcomes you’re looking for. That’s all for late I’m Christian, the work from anywhere digital marketing guy. See on the next one.
