I’ve noticed that when you prepare a meal (vs having it prepared for you), it tastes better. Yes, it requires more effort, but the appreciation is felt in the consumption.
This extends beyond culinary adventures.
Decades of product design have worked to attack friction as a problem. Most digital experiences are optimized toward a similar goal: remove the steps and clicks to shorten the time to ah-ha. The impetus for this is a belief that ease and value are the same thing.
They aren’t. At least not always.
A new trend has surfaced to counteract this notion is called “friction maxxing.“ Here’s the underlying thought behind it: there is more value in things we struggle through than things that come easily. Or put more simply: effort leads to value. In many things, the struggle is the reward. Take that away and the reward starts to feel like a participation trophy.
Perhaps this helps explain why sales in vinyl records have increased for nineteen consecutive years. Listening to music through vinyl requires significantly more effort than streaming music.
Facebook tried a version of removing friction back in 2011 with disastrous results. They introduced “frictionless sharing” as a way to auto-post every activity a person was doing without requiring input from the user. Engagement took a nosedive. (Turns out people didn’t want their feed showing they had just listened to Call Me Maybe on repeat for the 37th time.) Being able to choose what to share was the part that made sharing feel meaningful. Take that friction, choosing to share something, away and you remove the meaning associated with it.
Think about how you develop expertise or mastery with something. All of those roads lead to this concept of “progressive overload”: growth requires a challenge that lives slightly beyond our current threshold. This applies to muscles as much as it applies to our minds.
If you work in the professional world, this might show up when you evaluate the path to value in the solutions you’re building. Does removing friction elevate that path or cheapen it? This question is most often answered with a universal “make it easier for people”. Easier is nice, but easier is not always the path to value. Sometimes the journey that requires effort is the one people remember.
Let’s look at how this might show up in parenting. If a child is always given the easy road, does that strengthen their development or just delay the struggle for when the stakes will be undoubtedly higher?
I get it. Kids aren’t likely volunteering for the hard road, but sometimes that road is paved with invaluable capability building. Often, it feels like the art of parenting is having the discernment of when to ease the path and when to add an invisible scaffold of support.
How about coaches of athletes? This is maybe the best place to see where the concept of friction maxxing aids a person’s growth. Our capabilities expand at the edge of capacity, not within our comfort zone. It’s not hard to find a video of Nick Saban talking about this. But again, it comes back to our discernment and those decisions travels well beyond the field.
At this point, maybe we should friction max everything, right? I don’t think so. That’s its own trap. Frictionless and friction maxxing are two sides of the same coin. They sit at the extremes and value is rarely found in the extremes. The value is in the noticing. In determining which struggles might strengthen purpose and which ones do not.
If you’re thinking about removing a step or automating a process, take a quick pause and ask one question: Does this make the outcome better, or just easier?
If the answer is better, remove away. If the answer is just easier, consider maybe the struggle is where the value lives.
If these ideas resonate, they run deeper in my debut novel: THE ALGO
It’s set in a time just a few decisions from our own. It explores what happens when the hidden systems we’ve been examining here become the governing logic of an entire society. Kirkus Reviews called it “a wake-up call to humanity, impossible to put down.”
It’s available now.
Want to go deeper on this topic?
“David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants” by Malcolm Gladwell. Especially the concept of “desirable difficulties”.
“Hidden Potential” by Adam Grant. Explores how growth happens through challenges.
“Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” by Angela Duckworth. Foundational research on why effort predicts what we achieve.
“Move Fast and Fix Things” by Frances Frei and Anne Morriss. Explores why the shortcuts that feel efficient often cost more than they save.