Stop Living a Frictionless Life

When was the last time you did something hard?

I don’t mean hard in the sense of life’s everyday friction—the interruptions at work, the overpacked schedule, or even the twenty-four-seven news cycle. I mean something that you intentionally sought out that was challenging, either intellectually, emotionally, or physically. 

Can you even remember the last time?

Over the past six years, I haven’t challenged myself much. Since the pandemic, I’ve adopted a softer approach to life, and I felt like I needed that for a time. The world was chaotic enough on its own, and for a while, I had to protect myself to get through it. 

Looking back, I know that I let that season last far too long. I adopted habits that prioritized comfort over character. As a result, I was waking up minutes before I needed to be at work, I was spending hours doomscrolling on my phone, and I was making a lot of decisions simply because they were met with the least amount of friction. 

I woke up this morning at 6:30—a full hour and a half before I needed to be at my desk.

In order to do this, I set two alarms: one on my phone and one on the counter in the hall bathroom. If I just set the alarm on my phone, which charges just a few steps away from my bed, I’m too tempted to hit snooze and hit snooze and hit snooze… But putting an alarm in the hallway required me to get up and leave my bedroom. 

It worked. I got up and I stayed up. 

The first few minutes were absolutely miserable, but then I was fine. And I had a whole hour and a half back in my day. The extra hour or so of sleep I would have gotten wouldn’t have been restful anyway with me having to hit snooze every nine minutes. 

This is a small example of how I’m challenging myself. There are several others, such as training for a 5K, losing weight through a caloric deficit, and writing a novel. These are all huge undertakings—despite the growing number of shortcuts.

I don’t think I’m alone in having avoided challenging myself. 

I work in corporate America, and one of the buzzwords that I hear thrown around a lot is “frictionless.” We want to create a frictionless enrollment experience for our students. As a society, we’re always trying to streamline, smooth things out, and remove barriers. But could this be to our detriment? 

Definitely.

Life has always been hard, but challenges are what lead to progress, to innovation. Tools have been created for millennia to make life easier, and we’ve gotten to a point where our lives are so filled with modern conveniences that we have to create our own challenges so we don’t stagnate. 

Nobody forces me to write. I do it because it’s therapeutic, a good creative outlet, and because I like the challenge. I like creating stories and characters and helping them solve problems.

A few days ago, a fellow author, John Guzlowski, shared on Facebook a screenshot of an email advertisement he received. It promised to generate an entire novel, complete with plot, characters, chapters, cover and illustrations, in minutes. I’ll share it below. 

This advertisement made me scoff because it shows a fundamental misunderstanding of its target audience. Writing a novel is an incredibly challenging task. It is a time, labor, and emotionally intensive process that very rarely results in financial success. In 2022, the median full-time author income for their books and other author-related income was $20,000. 

Writers aren’t in it for the money. 

We’re in it for the challenge. Using an AI tool that generates a novel in minutes that allows you to “keep 100% of the profit” totally defeats the purpose of creative writing and, ultimately, leaves you with nothing—least of all your pride. You’re not going to make much, if any, money from publishing a novel on Amazon KDP (most earn less than $100 a month), and you’re robbing yourself of the benefits of the creative process.

In a culture that increasingly derives value from the ability to generate income, it’s more important now than ever to do hard things because they’re hard. The benefits don’t have to be financial—there are other rewards. Rewards that will last far longer than money ever will.

Next time you’re tempted to take a shortcut or just avoid doing something altogether, remember that a little resistance goes a long way. Start with your alarm clock—I’ll be up in the morning with you.