In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley reframes friction in business as a catalyst for growth rather than an obstacle to avoid. Drawing from his e-commerce experience, Josh contrasts entrepreneurs who flee challenges with those who embrace them, arguing that leaning into difficulty builds judgment, leadership, and resilience. Using analogies like video game levels and weightlifting, he illustrates how overcoming friction unlocks new capabilities at each business stage. Josh encourages listeners to identify their biggest constraints, focus their energy accordingly, and view every challenge as an opportunity for personal and professional transformation.

Timestamps:

00:00:00 Introduction to Friction
Friction in business is not an obstacle but a necessary component for developing judgment, capacity, and leadership skills.

00:01:00 The Nature of Friction and Uncertainty
Business owners must learn to be comfortable with uncertainty and friction, which are constant and unavoidable parts of entrepreneurship.

00:03:23 Leaning Into Friction
Instead of avoiding friction, entrepreneurs should lean into it, as overcoming these challenges often leads to massive new opportunities.

00:04:30 Two Types of Founders
A comparison between a founder who avoids friction and one who embraces it, highlighting how the latter grows personally.

00:07:02 The Second Founder’s Growth
The founder who leans into friction develops superior judgment and becomes a different person, ensuring long-term success over two decades.

00:09:25 Friction as a Growth Point
Friction indicates you’ve reached your current capability limit, presenting an opportunity to grow “grace for grace” and level up.

00:11:33 Business as a Video Game
Each level of business presents a new “boss” or challenge, requiring new skills and judgment to overcome and advance.

00:12:47 The Curriculum of Friction
Friction is the curriculum needed for the next level, forcing you to develop capabilities like judgment, patience, and courage.

00:13:55 The Weightlifting Analogy
Like lifting weights, business growth happens by encountering resistance. Removing discomfort also removes the stimulus for growth and adaptation.

00:15:55 The Purpose of Business Friction
The business is not just something you build; it is a tool that is being used to build you.

00:18:14 Focus on the Biggest Constraint
The speaker shares a personal story about focusing his team on the single biggest constraint to overcome friction effectively.

Links and Mentions:

E-commerce Platforms
“Amazon“: “00:00:00”
“TikTok“: “00:00:00”
“Shopify“: “00:00:00”

Tools
“Weight Lifting Machine”: “00:15:00”

Concepts
“Friction in Business”: “00:01:00”
“Feedback Loops”: “00:05:42”
“Grace for Grace”: “00:09:25”

Podcast References
“Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast“: “00:00:00”

Personal Experiences
“Amazon Accelerate“: “00:18:14”

Encouragement and Mindset
“Prioritizing Constraints”: “00:19:25”

Transcript:

Josh Hadley 00:00:00  What if the friction that you’re trying to eliminate in your business is actually preparing the judgment, the capacity, and the leadership skills that you need to have your next breakthrough in your business? Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast. I’m Josh Hadley. I’ve scaled my own e-commerce brand from 0 to 8 figures, and I’m actively building towards nine figures in sales. This podcast is where I document that journey and share the systems, the strategies, and the lessons learned in real time so that you can learn what actually matters and scale your own business. My name is Josh Hadley. First and foremost, I’m a man of faith. I’m a husband to a beautiful wife and a father of four children. I’ve been selling in the e-commerce space for over a decade, doing over $20 million in annual revenue and doing multi-million on channels such as Amazon, TikTok, Shop and Shopify. And I am also the host of the number one business strategy podcast for ecommerce entrepreneurs called Ecomm Breakthrough. Today, I want to dive into those moments where we experience friction in the business.

Josh Hadley 00:01:00  a few podcast episodes ago, I talked about why perseverance is so important in a business. We also talked about Jensen, Huang, and Nvidia, and we talked about why uncertainty never really goes away in business. And so one of the key principles that you need to be able to learn and understand as a business owner is like you’re always going to feel uncertainty. And so being comfortable sitting inside of that uncertainty is actually one of the skills that you have to develop. And then likewise when your business meets friction, because most certainly it will. It may be a hiring problem, a people problem that you’re having to deal with. It could be a channel level problem, it could be a sales and marketing problem. You name it. The list goes on and on and on and on. You will constantly experience friction in the business. But hear me out. Most people in this world are trying to avoid any friction at all. In fact, most of society is kind of. We’re all pleasure seekers, so to speak.

Josh Hadley 00:02:11  We want to find in our brain tends to do this. What’s the least path of resistance? Because like, ideally, we would all just love to be, you know, hanging out at the beach, chilling and having no responsibilities. Now, some of us that are high strung and higher wired, like about ten minutes into that, I’m going to be like, okay, so what can I go do next? But for most people, they’re trying to look for the easy way out, like going and doing the hard thing and rubbing up against friction is not a pleasurable activity. In fact, it’s very hard and oftentimes it can feel very defeating. And I’ve shared this, like I’m going through a season where I’m experiencing a lot of friction, there’s a lot of uncertainty. There’s a lot of like, second guessing whether I’m utilizing that judgment that I talked about in that last podcast episode, whether I have good enough judgment or not. But look, at the end of the day, my judgment is gaining in in its ability to recognize patterns as I continue to move forward.

Josh Hadley 00:03:23  And so my word of encouragement to any of you facing friction in your business is lean into that friction. Because what I have found is, as I lean into that friction, instead of trying to distract myself by chasing easier things in the business, that as soon as I kind of get through that friction, it actually begins to open some massive doors for me. And so I want to share kind of a couple of stories here. Imagine two different founders that are starting businesses at the exact same time. Okay. The first founder is obsessed with removing friction from his own life. He just wants an easy life. He wants to, you know, just hang out with the kids. Wants freedom of lifestyle, everything. Right? We all want that. Those are. Those aren’t bad things. But every time something gets hard, he changes the direction. If paid ads on meta stop performing, he blames the channel and says oh well, Facebook meta. They they changed the algorithm, right? Same thing on TikTok shop.

Josh Hadley 00:04:30  well, it was because the US acquired TikTok shop. So now nobody’s going viral. They change the algorithm. If a team member struggles, he jumps in and he just does the work himself because I don’t want to deal with the people problems. And if a product launch disappoints, he moves on to the next idea. He stays busy, but he keeps engineering his life so that he rarely has to sit inside of discomfort or friction or a problem for long enough for it to change him And notice that I’m using the word change him. Okay. Because I truly believe entrepreneurship and being a parent, those two things are one of the best refining mechanisms if we want to become our best selves. Like without a doubt. Parenthood teaches us never ending patience at the end of the day. It also teaches us to delay gratification because, look, you’re going to spend 20 years until you, you know, have actually raised a child at the end of the day. And then there is fulfillment that comes watching them learn and grow.

Josh Hadley 00:05:42  And as they have their own families. But like, that’s delayed gratification. Now, the same thing is true in business. But in business the feedback loops come a lot faster, right? Because a decision I make today, I could see the return on that through meta ads or Amazon ads tomorrow. I could see the results. And so the feedback loops allow us to continue to grow and develop. Now let’s talk about the second founder. Because the second founder reacts differently when ads stop working. She studies why she learns the creative strategy. She understands the customer psychology, the offer construction and the unit economics. When her team struggles, she resists taking the work back and she learns how to set expectations. She learns how to actually coach people. She learns how to build scorecards and to create accountability, and when a product launch fails, she does a post-mortem that forces herself to answer the uncomfortable question what did I believe that turned out not to be true? What did I assume that made this opportunity not come to fruition? And guess what? Five years later.

Josh Hadley 00:07:02  The difference between these two founders is not simply that one business is bigger, or this one was more successful. The second founder has become a different person because it might be true in just five years. Entrepreneur number one that continued to avoid the hard things. Guess what? He’s probably really good at going and doing the easy things to go. Arbitrage opportunities. And look, they could make massive amounts of money. One of them could have been, hey, you know, one of the easiest paths is I’m going to go put my, my money into cryptocurrency. And that’s where the bit we’re going to start focusing on cryptocurrency in the business. Right. True. Fine. It’s good. And guess what? If the cryptocurrency runs up like great. He could be sitting on a high five years later. But what I am trying to like define for you is money Is not all that this is all about. At the end of the day, we are each on our own journey of becoming our best self.

Josh Hadley 00:08:10  That’s truly what I believe is happening to us right now. And guess what? Money is a tool. It augments who we are internally. And so I think it’s a great thing. I would love to earn more money. Money is not bad, but it is not everything. And what I believe the value that comes from the second founder is the fact that they change as a person. Their judgment layer increases rapidly. And when I project things out between entrepreneur A and entrepreneur B, guess what? Entrepreneur B wins over the course of two decades? Get that point? Entrepreneur B wins over the course of two decades, whereas entrepreneur A is going to continue to bounce from idea to idea to idea over the next two decades. Okay. That is the value of friction. We usually interpret friction as evidence that something is wrong. Sometimes it is, but very often friction is simply the point where your current capability has reached its limit. You have built the business as far as the current version of you knows how to build it.

Josh Hadley 00:09:25  Now something has to grow. And this is where I think the principle of growing grace for grace becomes incredibly relevant. And I’m sharing this with you because, again, I’m still going through this season where I have there’s massive friction in the business. It is not all sunshine and rainbows. It is not just like, hey, we’re on this like, like downhill slope and everything’s just going our way. Like, quite the contrary. Like, it is hard. And I listen to a podcast episode that said, you know, basically, like, you should be looking for friction in your life, and they use this, you know, kind of analogy. Or they talked about the principle of growing grace from grace and it like, enlighten my mind. And I was like, that’s exactly right. I’m trying. You know, I can see the future. I can see my myself 20 years from now. And I can see the business being a $100 million business. And if it frustrates me, then I’m not quite there yet.

Josh Hadley 00:10:26  But when I take a step back and I recognize that, like, I’m still going through that process of growing grace for grace, I can kind of like take a step back and say, okay, all in its due time. I just need to exercise more patience. So likewise, Christ did not receive the fullness all at once. John teaches that he received not the fullness at first, but he continued from grace to grace. Okay? And we continue from grace to grace until you receive that fullness. There is a pattern here. Okay, all of us. We are given enough capacity for the level that we are currently at. And then guess what? We’re going to encounter something that exceeds that capacity, and we’re going to struggle with it. And we’re going to learn. You stretch, you receive more light, more judgment, more ability, more responsibility. And then guess what? Another level appears. That’s why I go back a couple of weeks ago when I talked about like perseverance and see the game of business as like a video game.

Josh Hadley 00:11:33  At the end of every level, there’s a boss that you have to beat in order to rise to the next level. And guess what? The first time you try to beat that boss, you’re probably going to fail. But then the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth time you start to identify, oh, these are the bosses weaknesses. Okay, I have now up leveled my own judgment and skills. I know how to go slay that beast. And then I’m going to uplevel myself to get to the next level of business. So the principle is this grace for grace. While growing in that video game from one level to another, in business that often looks like this at $1 million, your problem might just be learning how to sell and find a product market fit at $5 million. Your problem might be trying to figure out like how to hire people, how to delegate, and how to keep people accountable at 10 million. Your problem might be learning how to actually lead leaders. Instead of just hiring people to go execute tasks for you, you are now looking for that judgment layer in your business and actually hiring leaders and having to maybe fork out more money than you would ideally like.

Josh Hadley 00:12:47  And then at $20 million, your problem might be learning how to allocate capital and build systems that work without you. So ultimately, every level of business exposes something that your previous level allowed you to ignore. So the friction that you’re experiencing right now is not necessarily the thing standing between you and the next level. Quite the contrary. The friction may be the curriculum that you need to get to the next level, and that changes the question. Instead of asking, how do I get rid of this problem in my business? You start asking, what capability is this problem forcing me to develop? Because maybe it’s helping you develop judgment. Maybe it’s patience, maybe it’s courage or faith. Maybe it’s financial discipline. Maybe it’s the ability to have hard conversations with your team members. Maybe it’s the ability to trust someone else to do something differently than how you would do it. Maybe the lesson is simply learning to stay with the problem long enough to actually understand it, because there’s a dangerous thing that happens when you constantly avoid friction.

Josh Hadley 00:13:55  You can accidentally avoid the exact experiences that would have produced your next level of growth. And my favorite analogy is this lifting weights. By the way, I love lifting weights. My favorite. I’ve gone to the gym multiple times. I used to lift a lot of free weights. I’ve tried so many different things. The number one thing that I have absolutely fallen in love with is the total machine like is mounted to the wall and it has like these magnetic, electric, weights in them. Initially you’re like, like that. Surely that’s not going to be very impactful. Like, quite the contrary, I have seen amazing results. because of that. So shout out there’s a there’s a quick plug for that. But let’s talk about this as it relates to like lifting weights because I think this is very analogous. Think about lifting weights. The adaptation happens because the muscle encounters resistance it is not currently prepared for. If you remove the resistance every time it becomes uncomfortable, you also remove the stimulus for growth.

Josh Hadley 00:15:00  Okay. Like if you’re in the middle, if you’re like, this weight’s too heavy, right? Like, I get 75% of the way. And then I it’s just like, I don’t want to feel the pain, so I just drop the weight. Okay, cool. Well guess what? Your muscles will never grow. They’ll never adapt because you’re giving up when you’re 75% of the way there. Can you push through that final 25%? And then guess what? Over the course of it’s not going to be the next day, it’s not going to be the next week, but next month, I guarantee you that like it will be. Maybe you could get it to 80% without pain. And then the following month after that it’s 85%. And then the following month 90, 95, 100 business works the exact same way. The goal is obviously not to create unnecessary suffering, right? Like, I’m not like a masochist. That’s like we should just suffer like. No. Like life is meant for us to have joy.

Josh Hadley 00:15:55  But some friction is stupidity. Bad systems sometimes just need to be fixed. Bad processes should be eliminated. Wrong strategies should be abandoned. But there’s another category of friction that you should be very careful about eliminating. And that’s the friction caused by your own developmental edge. And that friction deserves to be leaned into, because maybe the business is not merely something that you are building. Maybe, in a very real sense, the business is one of the things that is actually being used to build you as a human being. And perhaps that is what grace for grace looks like in the life of an entrepreneur. You receive enough capacity to carry today’s responsibilities, and tomorrow’s responsibility exposes tomorrow’s weakness. Tomorrow’s weakness becomes tomorrow’s lesson. And after you learn it, you were entrusted with more grace for grace. Capacity for capacity. Responsibility for responsibility. Until. Guess what? One day you’re going to look back and realize that the problems you once begged to disappear. Those were the exact problems that taught you how to carry what you have now.

Josh Hadley 00:17:08  And so that is my biggest words of encouragement for any of you experiencing difficulty right now, you know. First, see if there’s like a wrong strategy that you have. like, don’t just lean into friction just because I said that it’s good to do hard things, know like be smart about it. But if you know you’re up against a new boss, that you have not beat that level yet, then lean into that. And if you know that if I actually solve this one thing, all the other dominoes get knocked over in my business. And this is the this is the end all be all for what we’re trying to achieve, then keep going at that thing even though it might not be. It’s like that concrete wall analogy. You might not knock it over after one swing, but after 100, after 1000 swings, you’ll definitely start to see some chips, some cracks, and eventually that concrete wall will topple over, so don’t give up too soon. My final word of encouragement to you because like I said, I’m in this season of business for myself.

Josh Hadley 00:18:14  On the airplane back from I was at Amazon Accelerate and having talked to a few other entrepreneurs, you know, they were crushing it in certain sales channels. And to be honest with you, because I’m experiencing this friction on some of our bigger priorities right now, I was frankly, like defeated, you know, somewhat throwing my own like, little pity party is like, why do they have it so much easier? And I can’t figure this out. What’s wrong with me? I’m not as smart, I’m stupid, blah blah blah. And guess what? That a that’s when I listen to that podcast. But B this is the thing that actually flipped my mindset immediately. I sat down and I wrote an email to my team and every single department. I said, here is the number one constraint that I need you to solve. Please disregard the other 80% of your tasks that are preoccupying your time, and I want 80% of your time focused on this one thing. For every department, I did that and immediately my eye was like, that’s it.

Josh Hadley 00:19:25  Like instead of this kind of like big behemoth of like, oh, I don’t know how I’m gonna do that. I got very specific with what the goals are and informing the team. This is the constraint. Let’s go tackle this. I’m giving you my my permission to say, hey, those other issues that we have going on right now, like our customer service, may not be the ideal customer service I want to have at the end of the day, but that’s a dumpster fire that I am comfortable letting burn while I go solve the bigger constraint. And so I gave my team that permission to say ignore the rest. Go focus on the constraint. Let’s lean into this difficulty rather than trying to just avoid it by keeping ourselves busy in too many extra things. And my mind. Not not only was my like, my mood immediately uplifted, and I think it was just because I had an unlock in my mind and I was like, oh, this isn’t as hard as I thought it was. Now it’s still going to take weeks and months to actually go solve these constraints, but I’m very confident that instead of this ambiguous like, oh, how do we solve this constraint? It’s now very clear to me in my mind, it didn’t come from AI, and it comes from sitting in that friction, thinking through what is it that we actually need to do, and prioritizing what the constraint is and ignoring the rest.

Josh Hadley 00:20:55  If you found value in today’s episode, make sure that you share it with another operator who needs to hear this. Share it in your mastermind group. Share it in the slack community. And until next time, good luck out there.