Last weekend I bought myself a long-overdue new pair of shoes.

My previous pair of New Balances were well over a year old, and, based on my daily step-count, had accumulated more than 3,500km of use, the rough equivalent of walking from San Fransisco to Chicago.

The mesh covering the toes had torn in several places, the insoles had each become a mangled mess, and any hint of tread on the soles had long been worn away to pure smoothness.

Needless to say, the shoes had seen better days.

This was perhaps best evidenced by the fact that at least once per outing, a rock would find its way in through some hole or another.

When it did, I would invariably follow the same process most of us do when faced with a rock in our shoe.

Upon first noticing the rock, we tell ourselves it’s manageable and keep walking.

As we walk, we scrunch and squirm our feet, attempting to shift the stone to a more tolerable position. With so little room to maneuver, however, if we do manage to move the stone it’s only to an equally (or perhaps even more) irritating location.

On we walk despite the discomfort, annoyed at the thought of halting our progress in order to deal with such a tiny annoyance. We’re making great time, after all…

“Maybe if I keep walking long enough, I’ll wear the stone into nothing,” we muse to ourselves hopefully.

Sooner or later, however, we reach a point where we’re forced to confront the fact that we can continue no further without addressing the issue, and that the only solution is to stop walking, remove the shoe, dump the stone, and then lace back up.

If we’re lucky, we’ll have paused to remove the stone before the skin has been worn raw or broken.

If we’ve waited too long, however… Well, we’re in for a difficult, painful journey ahead.

Left unattended, even the smallest grain of sand will cause a blister that hobbles and eventually renders us no longer able to move forward at all.

Of course, removing and re-tieing a shoe is far from an arduous procedure.

And yet for some reason, the thought of stopping to perform it always presents an outsized feeling of annoyance.

So we put it off and continue walking, often to our own detriment.

This behaviour isn’t confined to rocks in our shoes.

We face various sources of friction in our creative work as well.

And while the fixes are often as simple as pausing to remove a stone from our shoe, we delay, telling ourselves it’s nothing and that we can push through.

And yet, as with a stone against skin, even the tiniest sources of friction will eventually hobble us if left unaddressed.

Maybe friction exists between you and a team member or collaborator and has the potential to fester into larger problems.

Maybe friction exists in a part of your creative process that has the potential to sap the joy from the parts you once loved.

Maybe friction exists between you and an entirely misaligned business or creative platform you’ve built, which is successful… but grates against you with every movement.

It’s always frustrating and inconvenient in the moment to pause, take off our shoes and remove the irritant.

The loss of momentum and delay feel hard to justify.

Even more so when we’re walking through an environment that almost guarantees that we’ll pick up a new stone as soon as we return to our feet.

But these stones we pick up can’t be worn down. The friction they cause can’t be outlasted.

So if we don’t slow down and address the friction as it appears, we won’t make it to our destination at all, no matter the pace we’ve kept up to that point.

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