You're not crazy. You're not lazy. You're being robbed.
You will lose 730 days of your life to friction. Not traffic. Not your commute. Friction. The phone trees. The doom-loop apps. The subscriptions you can't cancel. The forms that exist for no reason. The "updates" that break everything that worked.
This isn't bad design. It's the business model.
It's built on purpose, to steal your time, drain your money, and wreck your sanity one polite little obstacle at a time. And the receipts are real: the FTC found that 76% of subscription sites and apps use dark patterns engineered to manipulate you. That's not a hot take. That's a finding.
In Fck Your Friction*, Second City improv alum, three-time startup founder, and HIVE CEO Mitch Mitchem cuts through the corporate lies to show you why every modern "convenience" has become a con, and exactly how to fight back.
This book is your weapon. Inside, you'll get:
- The Grandfather Test, five questions, thirty seconds, that cut through any corporate lie.
- Fix It or F*ck It, the decision framework that ends paralysis in ten seconds flat.
- The Six Friction Identifiers, how to spot the moment a company has quietly assigned you their job.
- The AI Friction Killer, the only weapon that scales, if you use it right.
- The Receipts, who profits from your wasted time, and why they'll never stop on their own.
- The Reclaim, how to take back the hours, days, and years they've already stolen from you.
By the last page, you won't just be aware of friction. You'll be a trained, unapologetic Friction Fighter.
Once you see it, you can't unsee it.
Mitch Mitchem has spent his career in front of people, over ten million of them. He started at Second City in Chicago, then built "Comedy You Can Dance To," an interactive show that ran for twenty years at the Excalibur Nightclub, Universal Studios, and major venues nationwide. He co-founded High There!, a dating app that scaled to 300,000 users in under a year before its sale, and he has delivered more than 4,000 presentations across twelve countries on leadership, AI, learning, and behavior change.Today, Mitch is the Co-Founder and CEO of HIVE, a human skills, tech, and AI transformation firm with a 97% implementation success rate against an industry average of 6%. He and his team have trained over 100,000 people in human-centered AI, teaching them to fight back, not just keep up. Their philosophy is simple: amplify, don't automate. Build the tech that solves the problem, then teach humans to use it with real skill and wisdom.Mitch combines the storytelling chops of a performer, the engineering instincts of a founder, and the spine of someone who has watched the world break humans on purpose for thirty years. He says what the rest of us are still figuring out how to say, kind enough to listen, direct enough to make you uncomfortable. Real. Direct. Human first.Mitch lives in Tennessee with his wife and business partner, Diana, and their four kids.
