One of the best ways to grow in your life, in any aspect, is by increasing your exposed friction area to experiences. What I call friction area is the “surface” that will be exposed to the reactions you do.
Everything you do in your day compounds your friction area, and everything has feedback. If you let yourself do more things, you’ll iterate more over their reactions.
With a bigger surface, you compound what things will happen to you. It’s a way to control your life thinking in the long-term game. When you compose your surface area with good actions, you will be more likely to receive positive feedback.
As Sibelius Seraphini said in the article: How to become a Senior engineer faster?, if you want to grow faster in your career, you need to say “Yes” to every new opportunity. It’s a way to let yourself live more experiences. With more experiences, you grow faster, and when you grow faster, you’ll live better experiences. You increased your friction area, and you’re receiving more positive feedback. Positive feedback loops compound.
When Shawn “swyx” Wang said on How to Create Luck, what I called the friction area can be called the “luck surface area” too. It’s the same idea. It’s more about how you’re building habits and a routine that lets you create a strong friction area that brings positive feedback for you.
The idea of “friction area” is a way to bring a mental model that lets you move and iterate faster, building a systematic way to iterate over the feedback loop of your experiences. It allows you to reap the rewards of your actions more quickly and manage them better in the long term.
Now, what are you doing to increase your friction area?