Achieving goals, using friction
To achieve any kind of goal in life, no matter how small, an amount of effort is required.
The amount of effort required is mostly determined by how far you want to go, and the friction that you have to overcome[1].
$$ \text{Goal}_{\text{achieved}} \iff \text{Effort} \geq \text{Distance} \times \text{Friction} $$
This is how it works in the physical world, as well as in the intangible world.
The goalpost is somewhere, you’re somewhere else, so there’s a distance. Or a length of time, how long you need to keep going to get there.
There’s not much you can do about the distance. That’s the nature of a goal.
You can quantify it however you like, format it in a nice S.M.A.R.T. way. That might make it easier to understand, to track, or to communicate.
But it is set, it’s there, all the way down the field. You have your thing you’re aiming at, now it’s your job to figure out how to get there.
The more interesting part is the friction.
As is the case in the real world, this friction is determined by the weight, and the interaction with the surface.
$$ Friction \approx Weight \times Surface $$
The task can be easy, hard, or anything in between. There can be many, or few. So there’s some weight[2].
And there’s how easily you can get started, and keep going with the task, so there’s the interaction between the surfaces.
Friction is what you have the most influence on. And I dare say, for a big part, our lives are shaped by friction.
When you set a goal, it’s your first job to figure out what needs to be done to achieve it.
And then, since the amount of effort you can put into something is limited, you’ll need to play with the friction.
Either decrease, or increase, the friction. Depending on the goal, and the tasks involved. Make it easy to do the right thing, make it harder to do other things.
It can be that the friction is too great to overcome, and you’ll never achieve your goal.
It’s simply too much hassle to go to the tip for every single piece of rubbish.
Even if you’re crazy enough to do it, you’ll quickly exhaust all your available effort, and won’t be able to achieve much else.
So you introduce a system of escalation. A small bin in each room, which is convenient enough to overcome the friction, and you’ll actually use it instead of throwing stuff on the floor.
At some point the small one in the room is full, and since the total amount of contents now is more than just that single scrap, it’s worth the effort to empty it in the bigger bin outside.
You’re paying for the big one to be picked up every couple of weeks, effectively outsourcing your trip to the tip. In all, reducing the friction to a manageable amount, and achieving the goal of properly disposing of your garbage.
Now, since you have effort left over, you can add additional goals into your life.
This is how you move forward. Both in life, and in business. It’s a virtuous circle, spend some efforts to reduce friction, so that you have more effort left over to deal with other things.
Effort is your budget, in either time or money. Friction is the cost.
Friction can be psychological, emotional, physical, digital. It’s always there, in everything that we (want to) do.
Since the amount of efforts you can spend each day is limited, and friction is involved in everything. It’s worth to optimise both big and small. So hone your skills, outsource, and automate.
The more you manage friction, the greater the heights you can climb.
What’s a way in which you have managed friction to your benefit?