This week’s prompt will try to help you keep the good friction in your writing.
Your Prompt
I'm going to paste a draft of something I've written.
Tell me what this is trying to say in one sentence.
Challenge that sentence. Where is it weak, vague, or incomplete?
Rewrite the core argument to be sharper and more defensible.
Identify one part that sounds good but doesn’t actually add value.
Push back on my thinking. Don’t agree with me unless it holds up.
Do not optimize for polish.
Optimize for tension, clarity, and strength of argument.
Pushing Against The Grain
Sometimes friction is essential to our development, a lot more than we want to give it credit for.
We tend to treat friction like a bug in the system. Something to remove. Something inefficient.
But many of the skills we actually value were constructed amidst friction.
Steven Pressfield calls this The Resistance, and it's an essential part of the process of creating anything.
Writing a book takes time… not because typing is slow, but because change is.
You write something. It looks okay. Then it doesn't once you read it out loud. Then you realize you’re arguing the wrong point entirely. Then you back up and start again.
That’s not unnecessary effort.
That is the work.
AI can compress all of that into a clean first draft in about six seconds. And if your goal is to publish something that sounds coherent… congratulations, you’re done. Send it and move on.
But what exactly did you add to the world?
Friction isn’t always there just to slow you down.
Some friction is there to change you.
Same thing with a video or podcast.
You don’t get better because you hit record a hundred times.
You get better because you struggle through the hook… you realize your story doesn’t land… you rework the angle… you split the video into two.
That process shapes your taste. Your timing. Your judgment.
Replace it with a generated script and a synthetic voice, and sure… you can produce more.
But you’ve removed the growth that was making you better.
And that trade off is going to sneak up on you the more reliant you become.
Because AI doesn’t just decrease time.
It removes resistance, the good with the bad.
But good resistance is where most of your growth was waiting.
Where something feels off and you can't move on. Where you’re forced to clarify what you actually believe. Where your first instinct gets challenged instead of applauded by an over-eager AI.
Without that… everything starts to sound good enough.
So yes… a lot of people are going to use AI in the coming years to make things cheaper.
But the real divide isn’t going to be price.
It’s whether you’re using it to avoid all friction… or to engage deliberately with the right friction.
Because one path leads to more output.
The other leads to better thinking.
And those two paths have compounding effects.
