#599 Friction: Why making things harder can make you better

Sarah Ellis (0:00)

Hi, I'm Sarah.

Helen Tupper (0:01)

And I'm Helen.

Sarah Ellis (0:01)

And this is the Squiggly Careers Podcast, where every week we borrow brilliance from a person, a place, a book, even an object. And we try to turn that curiosity into useful action for you and your squiggly career.

Helen Tupper (0:14)

And before we tell you what we've been borrowing brilliance from this week, we have an exciting announcement.

Sarah Ellis (0:20)

Is it exciting? I think it's exciting. Yes, it is very exciting.

Helen Tupper (0:23)

Basically, every week we do the podcast and we produce a one-page summary of the ideas we talk about it to make it really easy to sort of turn your listening into action. And it's called a pod sheet and we put it in our emails and we put it on our LinkedIn page. But we've made it even easier for you to find it. So you're not going to go searching around. So all you need to do is go to squiggly.me.

Do you like it? Because everyone who listens is squiggly. So squiggly.me. It's great. Anyway, go to squiggly.me and then that will basically take you to the newsletter so that every Tuesday you will always get the links to our podcasts we put out to a week and you'll also get the link to the pod sheet. So squiggly.me is your place to go to sign up to our newsletter and get all the links for listening and learning.

Sarah Ellis (1:03)

And that has actually come from some feedback that we have had quite a few times over the years. It's just taken us a while to sort, which is we know that sometimes people do find it hard to discover the different resources or the summaries that we produce around the podcast. So you'll have to let us know. It should, it's designed to make everyone's life easier, right? Squiggly.me, it's the one place you need to go and then that's how you'll get everything.

So let's see, let's see whether it does the trick.

Helen Tupper (1:31)

Let's see, you can always give us feedback. Feedback is always welcome to me and Sarah. So today then, today we are going to borrow brilliance from, dun dun dun, The Friction Project.

I can't remember why I picked up this book.

I just, I really can't remember why, but you know, like I think I was in a bookshop and you know, you're just browsing and I was like, oh, it's kind of interesting, The Friction Project, written by two, I like Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao. Huggy, Huggy Rao sounds cool. And they're two Stanford professors, endorsed by many people, including Adam Grant and also Amy Edmondson and lots of people that we like and follow. And it is all about friction, friction at work and where friction can work for or against you in work. And so we started reflecting on the concept of sort of squiggly careers and tried to turn it into something helpful in this episode. So we're going to think about how you can spot the sources of friction that might exist in your work today and how that might be getting in your way. And then how you can get rid of bad friction. And then maybe a surprising thing, how you can create good friction. So I think a key point of the book is friction isn't universally bad. There is some friction that's actually quite helpful to make people pause and stop and think because speed at all costs doesn't always result in the best outcome. So I think we explore friction from two different perspectives, good friction, bad friction and how we can make friction work for us at work.

Sarah Ellis (3:00)

And actually I've really enjoyed, obviously you did some research and I've spent some time reading your perspective and then adding to it.

I think there's some very practical actions as you go through this. It did actually make me think about small changes I would make to make life more frictionless week to week in kind of the work that we do. And then actually I think the good friction is almost like a nuance that you'd easily forget or you wouldn't necessarily think of first. So I think that gets you to some surprising actions. I think the first one you're like, oh, this is going to make my life easier. Yeah. And then the second you're like, oh, this is going to make my life more interesting.

Helen Tupper (3:35)

But I always think with these episodes when we're borrowing brilliance, sometimes that works because you're like, I never thought of it like that. But I really like it when we borrow brilliance from something that can then become a conversation. Like you and I could be like, oh, where's the friction in your week and what friction is working for and against you. I think the more we take these concepts and they become conversations, the more, the better it is for careers.