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Welcome to The Frictionless Growth Challenge. This publication is laser focused on helping you find your “path of least friction”, wherein you are spending one unit of effort and getting 2x-100x back.
Subscribing will put you through our legendary Frictionless Growth Challenge, a 7-day event designed to help you narrow down on your most joyous, easeful growth, and align yourself to break through your biggest blocks in just a few minutes a day with the help of a group of amazing humans on the same journey as you.
I’m USA Today bestselling author Russell Nohelty, and I built The Author Stack. I’ve written over 40 novels, 19 nonfiction books, over 1,000 pages of comics, and even a children’s books. I have written for magazines and newspapers across the country, along with working on licensed content for many companies.
To date, I’ve made over a $1.2 million on my creative projects, and helped thousands of entrepreneurs build sustainable, thriving businesses that light them up and nourish their soul.
Every entrepreneur comes to me overwhelmed and flailing to do everything to succeed. Every time a new strategy comes along, they try to incorporate it into their workflow, not realizing that we can only grow by addition for so long before the only way to grow is through substraction.
There are a finite number of actions you can take that will have exceptional return, and instead of doing everything, you should focus 100% of your time doing those…
…but what are they? That’s what we’re here to find out by plotting your path of least friction.
What we really mean when we say “why is this so hard?” isn’t “why can’t this be easy?” Easy is a measure of difficulty, and if we wanted something easy, we wouldn’t become entrepreneurs. What we actually mean is “why is there so much friction?” Easy measures difficulty, but ease measures friction.
Easeful work removes unnecessary struggle, aligns with your natural strengths, and makes your effort matter. It’s still work, but it’s the right work, moving you forward instead of spinning your wheels in place. Most “this is hard” moments are actually “why am I stuck?” moments. The difficulty isn’t the problem. The friction is. When you’re stuck, more effort just digs the rut deeper.
Getting unstuck means finding the path of least friction that increases meaningful progress without eliminating effort entirely. Imagine yourself as a Jenga tower. Frictionless growth is when you find that block that slides out with barely a touch.
There are five SCALE paths we’ve watched entrepreneurs repeatedly use to achieve frictionless, easeful growth. We call them the S.C.A.L.E. paths. (S)potlight (blogs/podcasts/speaking), (C)ollaboration (shared worlds, anthologies, publishing deals), (A)rbitrage (ads/social media), (L)aunches (Kickstarter/virtual summits), and (E)vangelists (ARC teams, Influncer marketing, referrals). Learn more about them here.
At least one of those paths will very likely give you frictionless growth. You can succeed with any of these, but spending 100% of your time in the most frictionless path will lead to the most growth in the least time. We call this your Return on Energy Investment (ROE). You might get growth from several strategies, but one will give you the most growth, which is where you should focus. Learn more about ROE here.
This is almost certainly the one that’s also the most fun for you and the one you enjoy most, because you’ll be getting a positive feedback loop, possibly for the first time in your entire career. Once you have one flowing beautifully, the other paths amplify and augment your growth.
It’s not that you can do anything, but that there’s something inside that you already love, which can lead to frictionless growth, and we just have to find it. Think of it a bit like Anton Ego’s famous line from Ratatouille “Not everything inside you can lead to frictionless growth; but frictionless growth could come from anywhere.”
Each of those paths has five stages, which we call your Evolution Track. In Stage 1, you’re too overwhelmed/paralyzed with fear to do anything. In Stage 2, you are doing things, but none of them work particularly well. In Stage 3, you’ve found one thing that works really well, but you’re weighed down with a bunch of stuff that doesn’t work. In Stage 4, you’re honed in on what works, but capped out on how much you can grow. In Stage 5, you’re expanding and thriving. You can learn more about your Evolution Track here.
If you’re in Stage 1, then your goal is to do anything. If you’re in Stage 2, then your goal is testing all the thing to find something that works. If you’re in Stage 3, then your goal is to shed things that don’t work. If you’re in Stage 4, then your goal is to start expanding into new paths. If you’re in Stage 5, then your goal is to build your team.
While SCALE paths show you how to grow, your base Ecosystem reveals how you operate. Think of Ecosystems like the operating system for your computer. It determines what programs you run and how you interact with them, not what you do or create. Learn more about Ecosystems here.
There are five ecosystems. Deserts are tactical. Grasslands are sustainable. Tundras are cyclical. Forests are relational. Aquatics are expansive. While SCALE paths evolve, Ecosystems are stable and can be blended together.
Blended ecosystems combine two Ecosystems together, amplifying their strengths and weaknesses. Popular combinations are Savannah (Desert/Grassland), Bramble (Grassland/Forest), Glacier (Tundra/Grassland), Tiaga (Tundra/Forest), Arctic (Tundra/Aquatic), Swamp (Forest/Aquatic), and Estuary (Grassland/Aquatic). Learn more about Blended Ecosystems here.
Each Ecosystem is echoed in a SCALE path. Spotlighter = Grassland, Collaborator = Aquatic, Arbiter = Desert, Launcher = Tundra, and Evangelist = Forest. There is often alignment between them, but not always.
It is nearly impossible to grow your audience and monetize your work at the same time. The growth side means investing to reach more people and lower friction. The monetization side means maximizing revenue now through paywalls, premium pricing, and exclusive access, which inherently raises friction and limits reach. Both are valid, but they directly contradict each other. To grow, you need to reduce friction. To monetize, you need to increase friction. Pinpoint where you are on this spectrum, choose your path, and do it completely. Are you in a growth era or a monetization era? Learn more about the Growth-to-Monetization Parallel here.
Business challenges usually show up in four buckets, which we call the HAPI Compass. (H)eart challenges come from the ideas, projects, and creative work that light you up and resonate deeply with who you are. (A)udience challenges come from the people ready to champion, amplify, and ultimately buy your work. (P)rioritization challenges form around choosing (or failing to choose) one high-leverage move at a time, letting wins compound, and buying yourself runway for the next right thing. (I)ncome challenges revolve around the revenue that funds your life and fuels your creative work. Learn more about the HAPI Compass here.
Your biggest challenge will almost certainly form around one of those buckets, but we’re horrible at recognizing which one is really blocking us. We constantly misdiagnose them in ourselves. Misdiagnosis leads to solutions that make things worse. You double down on marketing when you need to clarify your message. If you have a challenge growing your audience, you can’t fix it with solutions designed to make you more money. They’re at odds with each other.
You can only solve challenges by using solutions designed to fix them. (A)udience solutions won’t fix (H)eart challenges, (I)ncome solutions won’t fix (P)rioritization challenges, etc. If you want to solve your biggest challenges, you need to use the right solutions, which means you need to know what your biggest challenge is right now, and almost nobody does, especially about themselves.
The key to creating lasting success revolves around constructing an integrated sales ecosystem that works as a unified whole instead of a pile of disconnected tactics, uses your time, energy, and resources efficiently, grows steadily without demanding constant handholding, generates predictable, sustainable revenue, and lets you focus on the work only you can do, instead of living in perpetual marketing mode. Learn about the elements of this system here.
An integrated sales ecosystem maintains two principles above everything else: leverage and sustainability.
Leverage is about doing something once and letting it create value over and over again. In business terms, it’s the difference between trading hours for dollars and building assets that keep producing results long after the initial effort. Learn more about leverage here.
Sustainability means building a business infrastructure you can actually maintain without going feral. Your systems should be repeatable, automated where possible, and supportive of the time and energy you realistically have, not the fantasy version of you who wakes up at 5 a.m. journaling about KPIs. If your ecosystem can’t scale as you grow and stay manageable when life gets messy, it’s not sustainable. Learn more about sustainability here.
Your path of least friction will lead you toward certain high leverage strategies that amplify your back naturally without unnecessary additional effort. Learn about these high leverage strategies here.
The Hapitalist approach helps you pinpoint the most easeful path forward, narrow your place on the growth-monetization spectrum, identify your true bottleneck, and match the right solution to the right problem.
Do this well, and you solve the vast majority of business challenges without expending any additional effort. In fact, you’ll probably save effort by cutting back on things that don’t work for you.
Yet it’s impossible to see this in ourselves, and to keep ourselves on track, which is why you need a community, preferably one trained on the same methodology as you and run by somebody who knows what they are doing.
Every entrepreneur joins us with something holding them back, whether that’s a mindset block, a marketing problem, a confidence issue, or a missing skill.
That’s your lock. But everyone also shows up with keys from things they’ve already solved, overcome, or mastered.
You might not have the key for your own lock, but you absolutely have one that can open someone else’s. And in doing so, you often find the clarity to open your own. The real magic happens when we use our keys and start unlocking each other’s locks.
Why is community strategically important, instead of just feel good vibes? Because if you’re in stages 1-3, then you’re lock will probably be opened by somebody in the same success path but further along on their journey. If you’re in stages 4-5, then your lock will probably be opened by somebody in a different ecosystem doing something completely different than you.
You are one human, going through one lived experience, consuming one person’s media, with one person’s brain. You’re gonna miss things, discount important things you don’t understand, and have questions that make perfect sense to somebody else.
Sure, you could study things and maybe figure it out, or you could ask a group of people trained on the same methodologies as you, who know what to look for, and they can give you the right answer in a few minutes.
You’re not stuck because this business is “hard.” You’re stuck because you’re solving the wrong problem, or solving the right problem with the wrong strategy, or solving the right problem at the wrong time.
You’re stuck because you’re trying to do it alone.
The path forward isn’t about working harder. It’s about working in alignment with your strengths, your season, your actual bottleneck, and the ecosystem where your particular gifts thrive.
That’s what easeful means.
And yes, it still takes effort, but it’s effort that compounds into momentum instead of friction that grinds you down.
