The Right Kind of Friction in Creative Work

​[00:00:00]

Todd Henry: In the late 1970s, a British designer named James Dyson, you've probably heard of him, grew frustrated with his vacuum cleaner because it lost suction almost as soon as he started using it. Very frustrating. And the bag that was supposed to collect dust kept clogging and choking the very machine it was meant to serve.

Around that same time, he noticed how a nearby sawmill used a giant cyclone to spin sawdust out of the air, and he wondered whether the same principle might work inside of a vacuum. It seemed like a crazy idea, but it was worth a go. So he went out to his coach house, and he started building prototypes.

The first one didn't work. Neither did the tenth or the hundredth or the thousandth. Over roughly five years, James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes. 5,127, each one a little bit different from the last, and each one teaching him something the previous one couldn't. On paper, it was the least [00:01:00] efficient way imaginable to build a vacuum cleaner, right?

Five years of wrong answers, every one slightly different from the last. But Dyson has said many times that every failure taught him something, and the answer was hiding inside of the struggle. There's no way he could have skipped straight to number 5,127 because the person capable of building that final prototype only existed because of the 5,126 that came before it.

That is the kind of friction that I want us to talk about today. It's the kind of friction that looks like inefficiency in the moment, but that turns out to be the only path to something that truly matters

This is Daily Creative. Since 2005, we've served up weekly tips to help you be brave, focused, and brilliant every day. My name is Todd Henry. Welcome to the So in these next several episodes, we're working through [00:02:00] Verve. This is a framework from , my body of work and my keynote and some of the things I'm doing right now called the infinite lever, which is what I call AI. And Verve is a framework for how we stay valuable and frankly, how we stay human as AI reshapes the way that we create, the way that we work.

The first principle, which we talked about last week in the episode called Be Singular in the Face of the Singularity, is voice. And today we're gonna talk about the second principle, which is effort. So V-E-R-V-E, voice, effort is the second principle in Verve.

And later in the episode, I'm gonna be joined by my friend Carla Johnson, who has spent more than two decades helping organizations innovate. And she has a lot to say about why slow, curious, and seemingly inefficient work is such a critical part of innovation and, and creative thinking. But first, I want to begin with a question that sounds simple, but that most of us have probably never honestly answered.

And it's one that I always pose to people the first time I meet them. It's the first question I always ask any leader [00:03:00] when I begin working with an organization, and it's this: What do you actually do when you're working?

Now, I'm not talking about your title. I'm not talking about your deliverables. I'm not talking about your projects or the meetings on your calendar. I'm asking what you really bring to the table when the work is happening, because many creative pros, many leaders, they don't actually know what they do when they are actually working.

And that blind spot is about to become very expensive. When you don't understand the true value that you add, the thing that you uniquely bring, you will inevitably automate the wrong things.

You'll hand off the very part of the work that made you valuable, and you'll cling to the parts that were only ever in the way. Here's how that happens. Slowly over time, we become so good at doing a thing that we begin to believe that the thing we do is our job. So the designer becomes so skilled at building layouts that she believes her job is building layouts.

The writer becomes so fluent at producing clean paragraphs [00:04:00] that he believes his job is producing paragraphs. And the leader becomes so efficient at running meetings that she begins to believe that running meetings is leadership. Our expertise is a gift, for sure, but it can also become a blindfold.

Because the better we get at the visible part of the work, the easier it is to forget the invisible part that made us good in the first place. The layout, the paragraph, and the meeting, they're, they're just containers. That's all they are. The real job is something much more rudimentary, which is bringing your intuition, your purpose, your experiences to bear on a problem in a way that no one else can.

The designer's job is, really, it's to see. The writer's job is to notice. The leader's job is to discern. Those are things that can't be automated. They are uniquely human things. So the first step in practicing effort is to define honestly and precisely what you do when you're actually working. Can you [00:05:00] answer that question?

If you can't, hit pause right now and spend some time thinking about it. Not what you produce, not what you contribute, not in a vague mission statement kind of paragraph, but in terms of actual behavior that you would recognize if you saw it. Until you can name it, you can't protect it. So what do you do when you're actually working?

What is the thing that you bring that no one around you can bring and that cannot be automated or else you would not be doing your work any longer? So once you've defined what you actually do, that probably very inefficient thing that is the core of your work, you can begin to sort the effort in your life into really into two categories.

When we talk about effort, there really are kinda two categories of effort that we exert. There's a friction that is the work. This is what we were just talking about, the thing that you uniquely bring when you are working. And then there's a friction that's in the way of the work.

[00:06:00] Another way to say it is that there's soul work, right? The work that is the work that you uniquely do, and then there's support work, which is the work that supports that soul work or the thing you do when you're actually working. The problem is we often confuse the, the friction that is the work with the friction in the way of the work, and we think the friction in the way of the work is our job.

No. The job that we do, the work that we do is the actual work itself So when we talk about soul work and we talk about support work, our job is to protect the first while ruthlessly removing the second. Support work is easy to spot once you start looking for it, right? It's reformatting the same report for the fourth time.

It's hunting for the file that you know you saved somewhere. It's chasing approvals. It's scheduling and rescheduling. It's all the administrative sludge that drains your energy without adding anything to the outcome. And by all means, we should be automating that. That's a thing that artificial intelligence is great at.

We should delegate it. We should get it [00:07:00] out of the way, the same way that you would hand it to a capable assistant, because every hour that you reclaim is an hour that you can give back to the thing that only you can do, the work that is the work. Now, soul work is different. Soul work is wrestling with a problem that doesn't have an obvious answer.

It's sitting with it long enough to ask whether you're even solving the right problem, and it's following your curiosity down the path that might not lead anywhere. It might not. It's the blank page. It's the bad first draft. It's the hard conversation. It's the 10th idea that finally unlocks the 11th idea.

That friction isn't a flaw in the process. It is the process because it's where your thinking actually happens and where your capacity actually grows. It often looks inefficient in the short term, but it's what makes you effective in the long term. And when you remove it, you don't get to the same result faster.

You get a lesser result. Over time, you become a lesser [00:08:00] creator. I call this the danger of results without reps. Results without reps. So you get the results, but you don't really have the reps. It's the proximity trap. You're standing next to work you didn't really generate. You can generate the output, but you never built the muscle, and eventually you lose the very ability that made you worth hiring in the first place.

Dyson's 5,000 prototypes were friction. They were, but they were soul work. They were the work. You couldn't remove those and have the same result at the end. So here's why this matters so much Your most valuable asset as a leader, as a creative pro, is your intuition. Intuition isn't magic. It's not. It's not a hunch that's just pulled out of thin air.

It's the accumulated residue of every problem you've wrestled with, every failure you've learned from, every pattern you've noticed, every observation that you've quietly collected over the years of doing the work. It's what allows a seasoned [00:09:00] creative director to look at a concept and know in three seconds that something feels off, and maybe you can't even quantify it yet, but something just feels off long before she can explain why.

And it's what allows a leader to walk into a room and sense the thing that nobody is saying out loud, to sense that there's a subtle tension beneath all of the conversations that we're having. That kind of knowing can't be downloaded, and it can't be delegated. It's built one rep at a time through the friction that is the work.

And if you outsource that friction, you starve your intuition of the very experiences it needs to grow. So every single day, we need to bring that intuition to our effort and to let our effort sharpen our intuition in return. As we build our, quote-unquote, "prototypes," our intuition is honed until we become the kind of person who can intuit an effective prototype So the most effective artists, the most effective leaders, the most effective contributors [00:10:00] seem to understand this instinctively.

When Ernest Hemingway was asked how much rewriting he did, he said he rewrote the ending of A Farewell to Arms 39 times before he was satisfied. Thirty-nine times. And when the interviewer asked what had stumped him, his answer was simply getting the words right. He could have settled for an ending that was good enough.

No one would have faulted him. Probably nobody would have noticed. But he understood that the struggle to find exactly the right words wasn't standing between him and the work. It was the work. Or in a business context, consider Jeff Bezos at Amazon, who in 2004 told his senior team that they would no longer use slide decks in their meetings.

No slide decks. Instead, anyone proposing an idea had to rewrite a narrative memo of up to six pages, and every meeting began with the whole room reading it in silence before anyone said a word. So to an outsider, that must have looked like a staggering waste of executive time. We're sitting around, we're reading six pages, or worse, we're sitting around writing six pages, and then we're sitting around [00:11:00] reading them at the beginning of a meeting.

Can you imagine the collective expense of doing that with high-powered people in a room? But that was precisely the point, because writing a complete narrative forces you to connect your ideas and to confront the gaps in your logic in a way that slides kind of allow you to hide. Writing is thinking. So Bezos deliberately added friction to the process because he knew that friction was where the thinking happened.

Where does your thinking happen? Now, I wanna push back a little bit on an idea that's been quietly gaining some momentum, which is that work itself is something to be eliminated. You hear it in the way that we often talk about AI, right? As if the ultimate goal is to remove as much effort from our lives as possible so we can finally be free.

But work is not the enemy. Work, at its best, is one of the great gifts of being human. It gives us a sense of, of identity, of purpose, of value [00:12:00] creation. We get to put our perspective into the world in the way that other people can interact with it. It's meaningful, it's contributive, and it's also how we learn to engage with others.

It's how we build alongside other people. It's how we co-create a better future that none of us could have made alone. When we strip out all of the effort from our lives, we don't become more free, we become less ourselves. And that doesn't mean that all effort is noble, of course, right? We don't wanna just glorify busyness.

That's not the point here. What we wanna do is be wise about which kinds of effort we strive to keep. Your voice is not just what you have to say, it's what you put into the world. Your effort is how you bring that voice to the world. So how do we protect the soul work when everything around us is pushing for the fast answer?

How do we stay curious under pressure when every instinct tells us to prove our value by responding right now? That's exactly what I wanted to explore today with our guest. Carla Johnson is someone whose work I've [00:13:00] admired for years, and in our conversation, she talks about why sitting with a problem is one of the most efficient things you can do on a deadline, how our expertise can blind us to what's possible,

And why the real joy of creative work is coming through on the other side of friction with a great idea. Here's my conversation with Carla Johnson. Enjoy.

Todd Henry: What a joy it is to have Carla Johnson. Finally, we've been trying to do this for so long, to have Carla on the show. She is the world's leading innovation architect, which we're gonna talk about what that means. CEO of Rethink Labs with over 20 years of experience helping leaders make innovative thinking their most powerful competitive advantage.

She focuses heavily on curiosity, which is something I wanna dive into today. And she is the author of 10 books, including "Rethink Innovation," which we're also gonna dive into a little bit today. Carla, welcome to Daily Creative.

Carla Johnson: Thank you. And I feel, Todd, I kind of a fan girl of your work 'cause I first discovered it when you, with your Accidental Creative book, and I [00:14:00] think I read that cover to cover about four times right in a row. So it's really fun to join you after being a fan of your work for so long.

Todd Henry: I'm a fan of your work as well, and very excited to talk with you. I know we've been trying to make this happen for a long time. So I wanna talk about this, this phrase, innovation architect. I think a lot of people think that innovation's just something that happens not something you design. It's something that, you know, "Oh, we're playing around," and boom, idea happens.

What does it mean to architect innovation, and what have you learned from all of your work over the decades of working with large organizations about how innovation actually happens?

Carla Johnson: I coined the term innovation architect because I look at that Venn diagram of really wild creative thinking and then structure. And a, a lot of people do think that innovation is that wow, like burst of brilliance, and I do believe it's a methodical, repeatable, scalable process. And so I started my career in marketing with architecture firms and especially working very closely with design architects.

And one of the things that I noticed [00:15:00] about them is that when they would work with a client to design a space, maybe it was a, a sports stadium or a theater or a, a place of worship or whatever it was, their early questions were always about what do we want people to feel when they come into this space?

Should it be ex- excitement? Should it be a sense of contemplation? And then they would reverse engineer their design to allow for that outcome. And I think there's a lot about innovation that I've seen that we can do the exact same thing. So I talk about if Lady Gaga and Frank Lloyd Wright had a love child, that would be an innovation architect, and it's that blend of creative thinking and structure that the structure doesn't have to be I'm a design thinker, I'm a data analyst, I'm a, whatever particular title.

It's really looking at how can we innovate and think about innovation as the outcome that comes from innovative thinking, and this is really something that everybody can learn to do, [00:16:00] and especially at scale.

Todd Henry: So one of one of the things that I love about your work and one of the sympathies that we have is that we both focus on frameworks as a way to get people to look in the right places and answer their own questions. I think that's often also something that pe- people think, "Oh, Carla's gonna come and give us the answers," and I don't think that's really the way that your work happens, right?

I think it's more about helping people ask the right questions, which means we have to be curious, and I know this has been a core focus of yours recently. You talk about curiosity being a competitive advantage, but it's hard to sustain curiosity under pressure and deadlines when we're, just trying to get to the answer.

So what are some ways that we can think about curiosity that will help us keep curiosity alive? Or what are some frameworks that would help us, especially under pressure, to remain curious when everything in our being wants to gravitate toward the first answer or the quickest outcome?

Carla Johnson: I think of curiosity in terms of [00:17:00] directional thinking. So I have a framework that I call the curiosity compass, and there's four zones. And I won't go into all of them, but the one zone that people tend to default in, especially as you said under, under pressure, is the efficiency zone.

And under pressure we say, "Okay, how much time do we have? What's our budget? What's our deadline?" Al- all of these very tactical, logistical types of questions. And the interesting thing is you can't be curious when you're so focused on details like that. It doesn't give your brain room to explore and expand.

So when we're under pressure, one of the main things that happens is that we have this almost diabolical urge to immediately rise to the challenge or answer the question and, prove our value, show our worth, show we can respond, just be on it and things like that. But really curiosity starts with sitting with the problem and really asking ourselves, are we even solving the right problem to start with?[00:18:00]

And with that urge to answer a question, by stopping, sitting back just a little bit and taking a pause, and doing nothing for 10, 15 minutes, but asking questions about what's right in front of you. Oftentimes, even if it is the right problem, when you bring the team together and everybody's purely asking questions, you walk away with a completely different perception of what that problem is.

And oftentimes, because everybody comes from their own experience and their own background and different perspectives, the team comes away with a better cohesive picture of what that looks like, and then what that next best step forward is. So it can look like inefficiency at the beginning, but it's really one of the most efficient things that you can do, especially under deadline.

Todd Henry: It's almost like a curve, right? That we hit. I'm trying to think of the right way to describe this, but it feels like it's inefficiency in the short term for efficiency in the long term, right? It's almost the opposite [00:19:00] of the way we're having the AI conversation. Okay, so I feel like AI right now...

Sorry, I don't want to jump into AI. I do wanna talk about AI soon but I feel like AI makes us efficient in the short term. It gives us a quick result, but in the long term, it makes us less efficient because we're not thinking strategically about, in, in the right ways because we've abdicated that part of the process.

And what you're describing is almost the inverse of that, which is we're going to build a little bit of what seems like inefficiency into the process in the short term so that in the long term, we're able to think more strategically because we've spent the time marinating in this problem and and really understanding who we are, what we care about, the right ways to approach this from the core of who we are versus just reactively, like you said, just filling in the blank because there's pressure to provide a response.

Carla Johnson: And that's so true, and I know, Todd, you have heard this over and over in meetings. People say, "Whoa whoa," like you're going down the rabbit hole. Bring it back in. Let's focus. And I think going down the rabbit hole is one of the most beautiful, fun, [00:20:00] joyful, curious-driven activities that you can do.

And especially, y- you know what it's like when you get a group together and you know each other, and you feed off everybody else's absurdity. It's some of that absurdity that comes from the rabbit hole and spending time in that rabbit hole that can really bring out ideas you never would've imagined, considered.

But it's almost like they're so absurd that you think maybe this might actually work. And I think that's part of that, that forced curiosity that AI could never replicate. It has its own patterns and things that it will do, but it's that constant, ping-ponging of ideas and bouncing off each other that really, that's our beautiful gift as humans that we deliver

Todd Henry: Yeah, it is interesting that we're starting to be able to see the difference between AI-generated work and human-generated work, even as AI gets better and better. And to your point, I think some of that is the-- we have an innate s- almost like a radar where we can spot that [00:21:00] desire, that risk, that belief.

I've been calling it verve, right? This kind of verve, this kind of lively, energetic, life-filled type of creativity versus what feels emulative, what feels derivative of past work. It's almost like a, a band making the same album seven times in a row. It's like, okay yes, you made another album, but it sounds exactly like, the last six.

What are some practices that you teach leaders or professionals to keep their curiosity alive, to help them engage in that early process question asking, curiosity?

Carla Johnson: One of my absolute favorites is I teach them how to swap hats. We, I think one of our greatest downfalls that makes us great at our work, but terrible at curiosity and creating that, that ripe environment for creativity and innovative thinking is our own expertise. We're very good at knowing what we know, but that also [00:22:00] makes us really blind to what's possible.

So I have people swap hats with, may- maybe they're an engineer. What if you were a Lego designer? Or, what if you were a magician? Or what if you were something so random and absurd? And the really fascinating thing is how quickly, especially very left brain framework thinking type of people, start to embrace that and go into some of that absurdity.

They're much more willing to go down the rabbit hole or s- or sit and spend time with the problem when they have this almost emotional disconnection with the outcome based on what their role and responsibility is in their world every single day. It's like it gives them a freedom to think differently, where if you just said, "Okay, come in together engineering team or accounting team or marketing team, and let's work through this as a, creative session or strategy session," they're still in the same environment where things like employee performance reviews happen and things like [00:23:00] that.

So if you can bring any sort of outside perspective and almost freedom to let go of that normal way of behaving, even in your normal environment, that's just such an opening opportunity for people to be curious and to start to think, "Wow, I, I never thought about how a Lego designer would look at how we design wind turbines or, how we look at our accounting process."

Or, maybe you're a marketing team that's highly creative but struggle with some execution things, so maybe what you consider is what would a design engineer or a UX, designer, how would they look at our process? And it's so fun to watch people just open up and feel a release and an openness to, to new kind of thinking.

Todd Henry: I love that, that practice. One of the techniques that I've used with teams over time, the prototypical problem I will give them is that we wanna make commercial air travel fun. How can we make commercial air travel fun, right? And everybody loves that [00:24:00] exercise because everyone feels the pain of commercial air travel, right?

So everybody has felt, at some point, has felt frustrated. And we'll give them this problem. They'll come up with all kinds of crazy ideas like, "What if we made the floor see-through? We put cameras on the bottom of the plane so you could see what you're flying over. What if we had, let's have an exercise, like bikes in the back of the plane, and people could exercise while they're on there.

Let's do," whatever. So they'll come up with all these great ideas, and then I'll say now we're going to use the same technique, and we're going to apply it to the problem that your manager gave us, and we're gonna..." And they immediately freeze up because if, when I-- If I were to, I've never done this with an airline, but if I were to give that problem to an airline executive or a team of executives, they would immediately start discounting we can't put cameras on the plane because it's gonna in- decrease fuel efficiency, and we can't put exercise bikes in the back.

We can't have people just sitting on a bicycle. What if we hit turbulence?" Where they're thinking of all the reasons things won't work because they have too much experience, too much knowledge versus people who are just random people out of marketing coming in "Oh, that would be amazing."[00:25:00]

So the... I love what you're doing because you're asking people to get outside of their role, get outside of their limitations, to just think about it through an outside lens. And often we're the ones putting barriers in place, right? We're the ones who are, like, throwing up our own hurdles to jump over, whereas a Lego designer would not see that hurdle.

They would just come at it from a completely playful place. And if we can get around that, then sometimes we'll see possibilities we didn't realize existed.

Carla Johnson: It's so true. And I call that, that tendency that we have to dismiss an idea that could come from a different industry or a different type of thinker, like we discount it because we say that would never work in the airline industry because, that's not how we do things. We don't sell that kind of product.

We don't function that way." Again, the turbulence and somebody on a bicycle. I call that brand detachment disorder. They ... That, that will always work there, but that's not how we do things here. And I think it's a big awareness of how we hold ourselves [00:26:00] back with excuses and say, a- actually it's all right.

We're fine. We're fine." And I think that tendency to s- to tell ourselves, maybe things aren't quite as bad as we thought. We're fine, we're not as bad as some other people. Sure, we're not as good as maybe we'd like to be. But I think that sense of telling ourselves, "No we're fine," I think that's one of the biggest lies that we can ever tell ourselves.

And I think when we can really nurture and fuel that environment for curiosity and exploration, I think that's when we really start to see so many things open up. And like you said, you take these teams through the exercise first in a, in an environment where there's no risk for what they have for opportunities, and it's when we pull ourselves back into our own that we start to freeze up.

Todd Henry: So one of the things I love about your work is that you in some ways are trying to democratize innovation, right? You talk about innovation being everybody's business, which I think is a great way to think about it. But most people don't see themselves as innovators. I think most people in organizations think that's somebody else's job.

[00:27:00] How does an, how does a leader crack that problem? How do we create a permission structure within the organization for people to think as innovators within the organization?

Carla Johnson: I think one of the biggest things is we have to define what does innovation mean in our organization. And I don't mean like a McKinsey definition. How... If you were sitting at a pub next to somebody having a beer, how would you explain innovation in your own company? And oftentimes when I see innovation as a value in an organization and I look at the definition, I'm like, that means nothing to anybody.

And we have to be able to define the behavior first, because leaders will say "You have permission to go be innovative. Go forth and innovate." But people don't understand what that actually looks like from a behavior standpoint. So if you and I were talking and I said I'm gonna go for a run," you know what that behavior looks like and you would be able to identify it.

So I think that's something that can really help [00:28:00] leaders spark that activity of innovation, is to actually define what does that look like. Is it coming up with ideas? Is it spending time researching other industries? Like really, truly define what does that behavior look like. And then because I believe that a lot of these things are measurable, some of the ways that companies can start to measure this is how many ideas is my team coming up with?

And then the next column is how many of these ideas actually move forward into execution? Because let's face it this, just the process of coming up with ideas, you're gonna have a lot of really bad ideas, which you should, because you go through a lot of bad ideas to get to good ideas. So how many ideas did you come up with?

How many moved into execution? And then how many actually crossed the finish line? So just a simple tally of those three things is really telling. And if people aren't able to come up with ideas in the [00:29:00] first place, it's probably a couple of things. There's no definition of innovation and what a good idea looks like.

We do need to tie it to a business objective, because at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to drive is business growth. But I think it's also the skill development, and that's why I wrote the book Rethink Innovation, because it taught people a five-step process of how do we look at what we see in the world that inspires us about other brands or other people, and then how do we relate that into our own work that gives us tangible, executable ways to come up with ideas and also pitch them, because a bad pitch can kill the, a great idea.

I like to tell the story of a software company in Atlanta, and they had set aside a week twice a year for the entire company to work on innovation.

And the first time they did it, the chief technology officer says, "It's everybody, not just the tech people." And so everybody contributed in a way that was comfortable for them. Maybe some people are great [00:30:00] at designing slides and somebody else is great at storytelling or whatever it was. But there was a woman on the finance team who was a part of this, and she was so inspired after the first week that she went back and she looked at her own work and she said, what's an opportunity here that I might not have noticed?"

And she realized that she spent 40 hours every single month, so a week, a month, working on a report manually. She taught herself a programming language, and now it takes 12 minutes to run that report every month. And you think that's, that's not fireworks and all the, sizzle that we think about innovation.

But if you look at just the basics of it, she essentially is doing 15 months worth of work now in 12 because she gave herself back a week every month. And I think that's really innovative. That's somebody who's looking at the work, understands what we're ultimately trying to accomplish, serve more people, get more customers, keep them at a lower [00:31:00] expense rate.

And I think things like that we don't often give credit to as being innovative

Todd Henry: And yet they are. Like if everybody were to own their own little six square feet, and innovate within that, it would transform entire organizations, right? If we were to seek that kind of ownership on an individual level. I, I wanna ask you, because I know you've s- you spend a lot of time thinking deeply about AI and how it intersects with creativity and innovation, and I know this is the question everyone is asking right now.

I know it's what all my clients are asking. What is your belief or what conclusion have you come to about the role of human creativity and the role of human, innovative initiative in a world where it's so easy to type some prompts and have AI generate, whatever we want? What is your, what are your beliefs about the role of human creativity in this age that we're about to embark upon?

Carla Johnson: One of the things that's getting lost in this use of AI is our [00:32:00] own personal understanding of intent and purpose and why we're using it. It's easy for people to just dump work into AI and get an outcome, and that outcome can be really awful, and it can absolutely violate the work that we do.

We see this with attorneys all the time who are using AI to create briefs, and they submit them and it's using cases that don't even exist. Or I read an article yesterday about two attorneys who... they essentially had their own chatbots arguing with each other. They took the outcome and submitted that, and the judge said, "This, look, this is obvious what you did because none of this is based on real case law."

So there's this tendency to lean on it for work that still absolutely needs our human thinking. Now, I do believe AI is an incredible tool and way that we can get significantly more work done, and in ways that take the cognitive and administrative load off of our [00:33:00] brains and gives us space to actually do the kind of discovery thinking, imagination thinking, creative thinking that we're best at.

I think where we really violate that relationship is when we assume that we can offload that imagination and that discovery thinking into AI, and that w- it will ever be as good as we are as humans. And I think that's the big lie that people tend to like to believe.

The conversations, even the conversations, Todd, you and I have from time to time about great work and what does creativity look like and creative work and the outcomes and the process and the thinking of getting there. That's the kind of thing we have to make sure that we don't try to outsource to AI, because that's something it can't replicate, and it's not only are we so much better at it as humans, that's a part of my work that I absolutely love is coming through on the other side of the friction with a great idea.

Todd Henry: [00:34:00] I love Carla's perspective because she put words to something that sits kind of at the heart of this principle of effort that we were talking about earlier. When she describes the urge to rise to the challenge immediately, to prove our worth by answering before we've even understood the question, she was describing one of the most common ways we trade our soul work for the appearance of productivity.

Her antidote is to sit with the problem, to ask better questions, and to let ourselves go down the rabbit hole long enough to find something that we never would've imagined. But I also love the story that she told about the woman on the finance team who spent 40 hours every month building a report by hand.

She taught herself a programming language, and she turned it into a 12-minute task. That is support work, and she was right to eliminate it because she gave herself back a week every single month to spend on the kind of thinking that only she can do. Those two ideas belong together. We remove the friction that's in the way of the work so that we have the time, the energy, and the curiosity to [00:35:00] embrace the friction that is the work.

And as Carla reminded us, the ideas that matter most often, they take years to ripen, which means no prompt will ever produce them on demand. They are the result of your intuitive layers that accumulate over time. So here's my challenge for you this week. Draw a line down the middle of a page, and on one side, write down your support work, the tasks that drain you without adding value. Look for ways to automate, delegate, or eliminate those tasks.

On the other side, write down your soul work, the things you do when you're actually working, the wrestling, the questioning, and the judgment that only you can bring, and commit to protecting it even when a tool offers to take it off your hands. And if you'd like help with that, every episode now comes with an action guide, and you can get it automatically by signing up at toddhenry.com/start.

It will be a ready-made worksheet where you can do this work on your own. It's absolutely free, toddhenry.com/start. And you can find Carla and her work at [00:36:00] carlajohnson.co, where I'd encourage you to pick up Rethink Innovation. Before I go, come back one more time to that coach house where James Dyson was building prototype after prototype after prototype.

If someone had handed him the finished design on the first day, he might have had a better vacuum sooner, but he never would have become the inventor capable of building the next thing and the thing after that. Those five thousand one hundred and twenty-six failures weren't standing in the way of the work.

They were the work, and they were what made him. So don't let anyone or anything take that from you. Remember, it's not what you know that matters. It's what you do. Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you want more information about my work, you can find it at toddhenry.com.

That's where you'll find my books, my speaking events, and much more. Until next time, may you be brave, focused, and brilliant. We'll see you then. [00:37:00]