When something feels hard, the reflex is moral. Try harder. Focus more. Be disciplined.
That reflex assumes the problem is you.
Sometimes it is. Often it isn't.
Pushing through friction without understanding it just guarantees you'll hit it again. You'll keep solving the same problem with willpower instead of asking why the problem keeps appearing.
There's another option: treat friction as information. Something is hard. Why? The answer usually isn't "because you're weak." It's because something upstream is misaligned—and the resistance is how you find it.
Friction as Signal
Friction isn't random. It clusters.
When resistance keeps showing up around the same task, the same time of day, the same type of work—it's pointing at something:
- The wrong time
- The wrong tool
- The wrong sequence
- The wrong environment
- A hidden decision you're still compensating for
The system is broken somewhere upstream. You're feeling the downstream cost.
This doesn't mean the work is easy. It means the extra difficulty—the part that feels disproportionate, confusing, misaligned—is diagnostic. It's not telling you to quit. It's telling you to look.
Diagnosed Friction, Removed It
For a long time, writing felt harder than it should have.
I blamed the usual suspects: motivation, discipline, mood, "not being in the right headspace." The friction was real—I could feel it every time I tried to start. But the cause wasn't what I thought.
What was actually happening:
- Too many inputs competing for attention before I even opened a document
- No clear entry point—every session started with "what should I write?"
- High activation energy just to begin
- An unspoken expectation that I needed clarity before writing, not through it
Once I changed the system—reduced inputs, created default entry points, lowered the bar to start, wrote in smaller passes—the friction dropped sharply.
Writing didn't become easy. It became appropriately hard. The resistance now matched the work instead of exceeding it.
That's how I knew the original friction had been signal, not just the cost of doing something difficult.
Misread Friction
Not every diagnosis is right the first time.
For years, I treated inconsistency as a character flaw. I'd start things and not finish. I'd have productive weeks followed by stalled ones. The story I told myself was familiar: lack of discipline, motivation problems, maybe just not cut out for certain kinds of work.
The real causes showed up later, once I stopped blaming and started looking:
- Systems designed for high-energy days only
- Defaults that assumed motivation instead of fatigue
- Environments that punished context-switching
- Routines that required decisions when I had no capacity to make them
I wasn't failing to push hard enough. I was pushing against bad design—and calling it a personal failure.
Once I stopped asking "Why can't I do this?" and started asking "What is this system asking of me?", the answer became obvious. And fixable.
Reading Friction
Treat friction the way you'd treat an error message—not a moral failure.
The skill isn't eliminating friction. It's interrogating it before you decide what to do.
Questions that help:
Is it hard every time, or only under certain conditions? If the difficulty is conditional—time of day, energy level, environment—that's signal. The work isn't the problem. The context is.
Does the friction decrease when I change tools, timing, or sequence? If yes, it wasn't the work. It was the setup.
Is the resistance front-loaded or persistent? Front-loaded friction often means bad activation design—too many decisions before you can start. Persistent friction might be intrinsic to the task.
Have other hard things felt hard in the same way? Patterns matter more than intensity. If the same friction shows up across different tasks, the cause is probably structural, not task-specific.
You're not looking for permission to quit. You're looking for leverage—the upstream change that makes the downstream work lighter.
When to Push Through
Not all friction is a problem to solve. Some friction is the cost of doing something worthwhile.
Learning a skill is hard. Having a difficult conversation is hard. Deep work is hard. That friction doesn't disappear when you redesign the system. It stays—but it makes sense. The difficulty is proportional to what you're trying to do.
Signal friction feels different. It feels confusing, misaligned, disproportionate. You're not struggling because the work is meaningful—you're struggling because something is broken.
The skill is knowing which is which.
A rough heuristic: if the friction clarifies once you're inside the work, it's probably real difficulty. If it stays cloudy—if you're fighting the setup more than the task—it's probably signal.
Don't use "friction is data" as an excuse to avoid hard things. Use it to stop making hard things artificially harder.
The test is simple: signal friction disappears after you fix the system. Real difficulty remains—but it clarifies. If you redesign everything and the resistance is still there, it was never signal. It was just the work.
The Principle
Friction is data. It's not a verdict on your character. It's information about your system.
Ignoring it wastes the signal. Powering through it blindly guarantees you'll meet it again—same friction, different day, same frustration.
When something feels harder than it should, pause. Investigate. Ask what the resistance is pointing at.
Sometimes the answer is "nothing—this is just hard." Fine. Push through.
But often the answer is "something upstream is broken." And once you find it, the friction disappears—not because you got stronger, but because you stopped fighting a problem that didn't need to exist.