Letting go of my friction

It was a totally random idea to buy the domain as it was one word and surprisingly still available. Then, I thought that it was quite cool to have it as a potential side hustle or consultancy business in future, where I go and solve peopke problems and reduce friction for other organisations. So why did nothing happen for 4 years?

Doing consultancy work or going solo is obviously a very tall order for anyone to think about, despite wanting to break out of the career ladder. This was especially the case for me as I was at the crossroads of my career then, and I didn’t even know which trajectory I wanted to adopt. My own career identity conflicted with my actual job, and I couldn’t even put an identity for myself.

The commitment to plan my career journey was much bigger than I could ever uphold. And so while I deliberated and focused on working on my future identity, the domain just laid dormant for 4 years. Over the time while it seemed nothing was moving forward, I became very certain of my core motivation — the unwaveringly spirit to reduce friction and improve others’ lives by making systems and processes easier, faster, better. While I am neither an engineer nor IT and won’t be able to come out with a physical product that others can use, but I see it through the people lenses and cut down on unnecessary work and processes, and have a knack for systems thinking.

Fast forwarding to the present day, Aspect was finally born on a random Saturday in July 2026. The spark was a random ask to Claude to build me a visualisation of a blog to house my essays — learnings and reflections from things such as stupid TikTok challenges to why do we stand on the left and walk on the right of escalators when evidence has shown that standing on both is faster. It was just a brain spark of 4 minutes and did not signal anything else.

Within 4 hours of development and setup, Aspect finally went live. Four years of stalling undone by lowering the stakes. While the prompt was totally random and just something I thought I could hold in my memories, I realised at that point that I could just have something nice for myself, and it doesn’t even have to a fancy big project. Just me speaking my mind on how I perceive the world, one friction at a time.

In trying to reduce friction for others, I actually held the friction myself by making a domain name so big and intimidating that I couldn’t even imagine beyond it. I finally overcame my fear and reduced the friction for myself by giving myself a place to be creative, to be free to speak my mind on matters that bother me, and just have some fun while using not letting the domain go to waste too.

And so today’s lesson: reducing friction doesn’t have to be a huge undertaking. It’s not always about making things better, easier, faster, but sometimes feeling better is also important. When people feel better about the work, they tend to be more motivated and produce better results.

Shipping Aspect as “just a blog” wasn’t giving up on ambition, it was removing the friction that was strangling the thing. The serious question is the one that stopped me, and the unserious framing is what actually made me make it. What made it personalised for me, was to have a little twist in how it would be used.

This register, rather than blog actually, has no dates intentionally. Work and processes follow a recipe and rhythm, instead of dates, and that is also how I process my thoughts and reflections. A thought now might still mean something later, and instead of letting a date wash it away into time, I decided to just number the entries so it would remain timeless and provide further insight along the way. This is life encapsulated — we live life forward, but can only learn backwards.

And Aspect has shown adequately that 4 minutes of thought with 4 hours of effort can reverse a decision made 4 years ago.