🛼 TREE 186: Friction

Google gives me instant access to the humanity’s knowledge and easy email and great fonts. For free.

Amazon lets me read any book. Right now. It will deliver anything I want tomorrow. And they throw in a bunch of films and shows as part of the deal.

Apple lets me copy something on my computer and paste it on my phone (!!!) plus a hundred other things that make my work easier and more pleasant.

These are hard things.
They require millions of line of code,
hundreds of thousands of people,
a vast worldwide energy-sucking infrastructure.

But for you and me, all it takes is a little typing and tapping.

These corporate beasts remove friction from our lives by handling and hiding the complexity. That why we keep using them even though we know about the employee abuse, tax avoidance and carbon cost. The removal of friction is incredibly valuable.

How can you use your skills to handle complexity and remove friction from people’s lives?

(Just remember to do it responsibly.)

Welcome to friction week. I’ll be sharing some thoughts about how I get rid of unwanted friction in my work and when it’s super-necessary.

Grow slowly
Jeff

Slide over here.

The Memory of TREE playlist – every song from every email: