The fine art of Friction Maxxing

Feel the pain and do it anyway.

It’s 5 am. I’ve been lying here for about 20 minutes, contemplating getting up to rummage about and find my asthma inhaler. I’ve not done it yet because, quite frankly, the bed is so cosy and the UK in the winter really isn’t. The world is black, thanks to a super-dooper face mask I got off the internet, and the room is pin-drop silent thanks to my Loop earplugs.

Many moons ago, I realised I was an artist. I have a theory that we all are, but we just don’t know it because we’ve been confused about what one even is. I’ll park that thought for today and get back to the main point of all this.

Doing hard things is hard, like leaving the womb-like cocoon of my bed to sort out the wheezy organic accordion in my chest. But doing hard things has a benefit.

WHAT DOESN’T KILL YOU MIGHT MAKE YOU STRONGER

We’ve all heard “if there’s no pain, there can be no gain” and “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. Well, as someone who actually died, I’m going to throw a spanner in the works here. It did, sort of. It made me much weaker in many ways. Cue the anxiety and eating disorders, but bring in the new way of expressing myself artistically and commitment to art.

I’m the broken record with the same old story. I wouldn’t change the pain. I can clearly see I wouldn’t be the man I am now without it, but I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemy either.

I slide the face mask up to hug my forehead. Grab the little tabs on each earplug. 3, 2, 1. I pull them out, and the sound returns. The boiler is churning on in the next room. Thank you, universe, for central heating. Two clog-like felt slippers later, a hoodie pre-toasted by the radiator, and an Olympic leap over the stair-gate doggie defence system. I’m downstairs holding the blue inhaler, life-giving elixir deep in my lungs. Difficulty level, maybe a 3 out of 10 if I’m pushed.

I CAN’T OVERSTRESS THE IMPORTANCE OF STRESS

Let’s bring in a couple of concepts here. First, the idea of hormesis. Essentially, low levels of the right kind of stress make an organism stronger. You exercise a muscle a little bit, the muscle tears, but ultimately comes back a bit stronger than before. A little bit of heat exposure does you good, same with some cold, even a bit of fasting. Overdo it, and you’re in trouble.

We are an adaptive species. You don’t rock up on this planet and suddenly become the apex predator by mistake; you adapt and learn, expand and grow capabilities.

The next concept I need to wheel out is eustress. This is stress, but it’s useful stress. Don’t get it twisted with distress or stress itself. This one gets you super focused, makes you solve the problem, gets you moving, and gets you thinking. Before you walk out in front of a crowd of people to give a keynote or make the trek downstairs for your asthma inhaler, you need a bit of stress in the system. When the rats in the lab hadn’t eaten, they could solve a maze better than the rats who’d had their breakfast.

LAZY LITTLE APES

We are hard-wired to survive, and trust me, your great, great, great, great, great grandparents, times a thousand generations, were in the business of eating, sleeping, and procreating. They didn’t want to waste energy going out to Nando’s or schlepping round the shopping mall and trawling through the watchlist they made on Netflix to watch back-to-back indecisive trailers. They are certainly wern’t getting all the camera kit out and writing the perfect hook for their next viral TikTok skit. If they’ve eaten, they are chilling. The brain pulls more energy comparatively than any other organ. This is why chess champions are chugging Coca-Cola. We are in the business of preserving energy. The cold, hard truth is that we are hard-wired to be lazy.

ART IS HARD

So what about art then? Well, that’s the thing. Art is hard. It’s more than we need to do. We need to want to do it. And to get good at it, or dare I say it, even win at doing it, we need to put in the effort.

We need to build our capacity to focus, perform, and push through. The inevitable pain, failures, and the well-intentioned upstanding members of society who want us to “get a proper job”. The 200th rejection. The embarrassingly awful paintings. The feeling of not quite being like everyone else. The loneliness of sitting there staring at stuff and arguing with your inner critic about what on earth you should do next. All the while trying to block out that voice of procrastination that will have you cleaning the garden shed and peak-Virgo-ing your sock drawer.

My chest is fine. I have a green tea. I’ve strapped a blue-light-emitting visor on top of my glasses. It’s now 5.30am. I’m on my computer, the dog is still asleep. I type my password in and before the world wakes up, I’ll have written you an article in the hope that I inspire you to do harder things too.

EASY PEASY

If you want a date, there’s an app for that. You no longer have to pluck up the courage to say hi to that person who seems lovely that you see on your bus ride to work every day. Cuisine will come from any country in the world to your doorstep faster than you can imagine, and you’ve swapped hunting and gathering for remembering the two-digit number you need to tell the driver. Getting from A to B and back again, well, that’s trackable on an app. Entertainment, you’re not getting your mates round for Pictionary. There are billion-dollar corporations ready to titillate your little dopamine receptors with a constant flow of perfectly pitched, algorithmically proven short-attention-span cinema. A back-to-back doom flow and your input, a couple of fingers to scroll. Need to think about something? Fire up the good old ChatGPT, tell it what you need to think about, thinking successfully outsourced. You’re brain is a like a muscle use it or lose it. The geek squad at MIT are already freaking out about what AI is going to do to rates of dementia.

The mantra of the founding entrepreneur rings loud. Find a pain point, solve the problem, sell the solution.

I have a clear message to them:
There’s not an app for everything.

I’ve done my writing. Good, bad, I don’t know, you’ll decide. But it was hard, probably harder than something most people have done today. Next stop, the gym. But that’s not that easy either, because I don’t drive. I walk. Everywhere. Even if it’s two hours away, I walk. And it’s the UK, and it’s blummin’ freezing, so this expedition is Shackleton-level. Long johns, thermal vest, waterproof shoes. Hurricane-proof umbrella, insulated thermal hat, and a backpack worthy of Mount Kilimanjaro.

My headphones play Björk. She screams that she “goes through all this before you wake up, so I can feel happier”. So true. But true Friction Maxxers raw-dog it. They don’t even have music. I’m not that hardcore yet, and if life doesn’t have a soundtrack, it’s not a movie I can act in.

MAXX FRICTION

Ten minutes on the elliptical, that’s the cross-trainer thing that’s a bit like a stepper but the arms are involved, for those of you who don’t know. Then it’s a proper stretch. And I mean full Rishikesh yogi, ten-thousand-hours, praying-mantis back-bend ageddon. These old muscles will not ache in the morning. (The truth is they always do). Then it’s 5k on a treadmill. Today’s artist of choice is Kid Cudi. There will be pain. A wall where I feel like I’m going to die. On the other side is survival, accomplishment, and a sense of achievement, plus the uptick in biological pace of ageing I can see on the screen of my phone. I don’t do this slowly. The sweat and the time it takes me to disinfect the contraption afterwards are a testament to that. Three minutes high, one minute low, rinse and repeat for about 24 minutes, and I’m destroyed.

Narrowly avoiding the muscle-bound, opinionated reformer who wants to talk about “illegals”, “boats”, and “wokies”, the sheer bliss of the shower is a small reward.

The walk to the studio is long, and it’s cold. My team is waiting for me, and I hate being late, so that turns into another jog, this time with the backpack of burden. Whilst I was running, I worked out the whole day and who needs to do what. I make sure everyone’s sorted, then I shut the door to my studio, and the real hard work begins. This goes on for five or six hours, paused only for a brief intermission where I actually physically go to the supermarket, pick real vegetables, chop them, prepare them, all nine different varieties, and cook them myself in a dish I simply name “the mega bowl”.

AN EASY LIFE MIGHT NOT BE A GOOD ONE

There’s a much easier way to do all of it. In fact, there’s definitely an app for most of it. And actually, life could be much easier, much more convenient and much more fun. But the thing is, I chose a good life, not an easy one, and I’m willing to show up and work for it.

I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t born especially talented. I’m not a genius. I’m a normal bloke. There’s no shot of Picasso or flash of Einstein between my ears. So all I’ve got is effort, all I’ve got is work. And I know that doing hard things increases my tolerance for that, and that tolerance is the only way I’ll survive as an artist, because living as one of those is one of the hardest things you can ever decide to do.

I earn my rest, and trust me, it feels so much better this way. I get home at 7. Clip my blue-light-blocking lenses on my glasses, read a real book, withstand an 85-degree sauna for 20 minutes, then eat home-cooked food, and physically write in my journal. Then 10 pm strikes and it’s eyemask and earplugs o’clock again.