Remove Friction. Make it easy to do things you like.

It kind of baffles me how little I “create” despite having a million ideas flowing in my head at any given point. Hundreds of half-developed thoughts lying around, and I’d tell myself “One day I’ll get to writing about it, when I have time to do some real deep research and organize my thoughts!” (this is a shame, because I almost never touch these ideas again…)

Even when I desperately want to talk about something, I’m terrified of not doing it perfectly. Yet perfection… was so exhausting. Researching a topic is just the beginning. Then would come the vicious cycles of editing and many rounds of re-writing. There was just so much friction from the point of getting the idea to actually finalizing it that my brain, dreading the process, would shut down. Without knowing it, my obsession with perfection became my biggest setback, and prevented me from creating so many articles, videos or “stuff” that could have been valuable to others.

It almost happened again the other day, as I was writing an article on precautions to teach children about child abuse. I almost abandoned it halfway, because the words sounded wrong no matter how many times I rewrote them. That was until I realized that I could omit my difficulty in choosing words completely by just turning everything into pictures with Canva. That would cut down the words into the core ideas, while still being accessible to readers. 2 hours later, I was done. Wait… what?

By removing the friction, that is my fear of editing, I was enabling myself to do more. It wasn’t just that one instance, I’ve been unknowingly doing this with other things in my life, and you probably have too. To remove friction from the social media plan I’ve been dreading to build, I modified online templates. Whenever I felt lazy to write, I use the speech to text function in my phone and edited that. And if before I was making excuses that reading was too hard or inconvenient, now I made sure to download a copy of my book onto my phone so I could easily access it whenever I wanted. The output wasn’t perfect, of course, but it was a lot better than no output (which would have been the case had I still been so obsessed with perfection.) I guess now it’s just about doing it purposefully instead of subconsciously.

Point is, remove all the friction in the process of doing your work and make it as easy as possible to do the things you want to do. And give up the idea that you have to do everything perfectly, too. Find shortcuts that get you as close to the best results, but with significantly less effort. The moment you free yourself from the shackles of perfection, you’ll get so much more done, pinky promise!

I used to wait once every few months to put out something 9, but now I know I’d improve more by putting out something 7 every other day. So that’s why I decided to write this blog post, even though it’s just barely above average, and a hardcore 7. Haha.