Adding Intention Friction to your Edge / Business
Increase Long Term Confidence By Increasing Friction.
Add Friction to your Edges
This is a concept from the future edge mentality book.
For context, an edge is simply a digital asset that produces income without you trading time for money. More on this in this post.
Adding friction to a business or project is usually seen as a bad thing.
You want to increase efficiency and effectiveness and adding friction would reduce this, so why do it?
The reason is to verify whether you have a real edge or not.
Micro-managing things, especially in the early days is necessary for success.
Profit is in the nuance.
Add friction initially to your processes.
Friction in this sense involves actually making a process less efficient and/or slower.
Adding yourself back into processes instead of removing yourself.
Very counterintuitive on the face of it, but the reason you want to add friction to your process and not remove it as most people think in the start-up world, is 2-fold.
The first is you'll actually learn what does and doesn't work within a process very very quickly.
If you are removed from a process, you don’t know when things are starting to break, you don’t know what causes things to go wrong.
There's a great section in Elon Musk's biography that talks about de-automating their manufacturing process and production at Tesla.
The short version of this is that Tesla was looking to reach an output of 5,000 cars a week, after essentially being told that output above 2000/week would be impossible within the factory.
One of the keys that eventually made this output of production possible was that Musk and the Tesla team de-automated many elements of the production line that could be done faster or better by humans.
That’s not something you’d expect to here from a tech billionaire. Use humans instead of efficient processes.
Very different to what they originally set out to do when the factory was first built, but as the goal changed from efficiency to effectiveness it became clear that in a lot of places having robots and automation for the sake of it is a negative.
You may have started to see this with the AI bubble.
Not everything needs AI.
Iterate Edges Quicker
The second reason to increase friction is you can actually learn way more and create new edges within the edge/project as you are monitoring it everyday.
An example I've found is manually tracking odds and price movements of specific sports (you can also replace sports with stocks , shares, businesses etc).
This would be extremely easy to outsource to a team member or VA to do on a daily basis and would save me multiple hours a day.
The reason why I don't take this "efficient" route is that long term it's actually less effective for the overall goal (£50k/month through sports betting).
During these hours of being "deep in the tank" as I call it, you can start to see patterns and get a sense of what is happening in certain situations. In the same way experienced athletes can sense what an opposition may do in a certain situation.
It's intuitive.
It comes with hours on the grind, looking at spreadsheets and odds, it doesn’t come from outsourcing everything.
These tweaks or patterns that may come up, only can be found by being deep in the tank or in that flow state on your specific craft.
This is the same reason why phones and constant interruptions are so detrimental. Everyone already knows this and there’s countless books and studies verifying this, but why do we still do it?
These deep work sessions of even as little as 2 hours a time, might lead to you creating a theory which you can then put through the structured research process. But if you had optimised this process too early and not added friction in the form of yourself, you'd never have this opportunity to find these value adds.
Adding friction, de-automating or de-optimising can be done in multiple different ways.
The best is simply doing everything yourself at the start of the process, and even if you have the funds to outsource it, simply doing it yourself, every step, will likely lead to you removing a step, improving others, or just finding something completely unrelated to what you originally set out to find.
The original edge you set out to build may look completely different to the one that changes your life.
A Live Example
As mentioned already, the creation of YOUR edge is unique to your skills, experiences, and goals.
It is where you have specialised knowledge.
As a result doing a live example from start to finish for someone to define the edge is quite difficult to do for a number of reasons. The most important though is that I know what to look for, what rabbit holes to go down, in short I’ve had more experience than someone just starting today.
Nevertheless, we’ll be doing a live walk through here in the search for another edge to aid my life.
For example I am going to try to find a real edge that results in £5,000 a month in net profit, which for most people is a full time job, but as per all edge requirements, we want to do it just using our skills, experiences and learning additional pieces if needed.
As this is “my” edge, I’ll be using all the skills and experiences I’ve learnt over the years, but I wanted to mix this with a hobby to show how much more enjoyable the process can actually be.
The niche I’m going to choose is something within sports, this is what I’m extremely interested in, and it’ll be connected to either marketing, business, analysis, analytics, betting, investing or something else as the channel to enable profitability.
The easiest one to understand is betting as it’s so black and white with the earning potential, but other elements such as becoming the leader in content creation for a niche sport (such as “weight lifting house” – who have 200,000 subscribers and only post content on Olympic weightlifting). Or the dozens of rugby YouTube channels with 50,000+ subscribers and insane engagement (which is the real key).
So the channel to profitability can either be media/content (subscribers, followers etc) – this is more of the “artist” edge, and just “posting” content is NOT an edge, but more on that later.
Another channel is the business method (creation of products or services for your niche) – most people find this difficult to niche down enough and truly innovate in.
The 3rd channel option is analysis / markets – so this would be investing markets, betting markets, analysis of teams themselves. An individual I know had a truly massive edge in fantasy sports of all things. That would sit here in the analysis / markets sector.
The 4th channel can literally be anything else – As long as it doesn’t violate the principals of having a true edge. This can be the true creativity where it’s so hard to think of and so unique due to your skills and experiences that if you told somewhere they’d say “is that even a real edge” – “I understand when mainstream weather forecasts are incorrect” – one of the strangest edges ever but one that’s been incredibly effective for me.
The key is if you truly find something interesting and appealing, it wont feel like work to develop your edge.
Anything that you are doing already (anyway) is a good place to look.
If you play chess, if you write poetry, if you paint, if you enjoy driving cars, if you enjoy testing products, or building chairs, or writing code, or speaking Italian or making cheese or catching fish. The only thing that matters is you find this addictive and interesting.
You’d do it ANYWAY.
It’s NOT a passion, but it’s something you want to learn and improve in, that’s the difference.
For me, I want to improve in business, I love learning new processes that I can implement, test, improve and put into a business to enable it to grow and scale.
I also love investing, but more, sports betting as it’s a way to get quicker feedback than traditional investing. If I think X team or player is going to win a game, why do I think this, how much should you risk, what edge do you have? It’s a massive game. It’s also why it’s so addictive, the feedback is so quick.
Cheers.
Thomas.