I feel like I’ve been experiencing bits of serendipity lately. Feeling utterly uninspired to write, I come across an article, or a podcast. Maybe my kids ask me some question. Maybe I just see a commercial that makes me think of something.

Today’s inspiration came from an interview Jerry Seinfeld did with HBR in 2017, courtesy of The Cal Newport Show. Here’s the quote:

DAN MCGINN: McKinsey’s a big consulting firm.

JERRY SEINFELD: Are they funny?

DAN MCGINN: They are not funny. They help people–

JERRY SEINFELD: OK, then I don’t need them.

DAN MCGINN: No interest in efficiency or–

JERRY SEINFELD: No. No. In fact, if you’re efficient, you’re doing it the wrong way. The right way is the hard way. The efficient way is the wrong way. In my field. I can’t speak to any other field.

Last week I spent perhaps too much time talking, and in some cases defending my stance, about the Marissa Mayer story and the fact that even if thinking about something is hard, you should still do it. So it’s nice to be vindicated by one of the most successful comedians of all time.

If I’m being generous, the people who took Mayer’s side last week don’t believe they should take shortcuts with their family. It’s that they believe that if something can be made more efficient, it should be. And that’s woefully misguided.

Just because something is efficient doesn’t mean it’s effective. Efficient doesn’t equal good. And in many cases, it’s the time, craft, and thought that make it good.

Great Things Take Time

Let’s look at one of my favorite vices: scotch. There’s a saying that any scotch old enough to drink itself is a great scotch. And it’s generally true: the longer a scotch is aged, the better it tastes. If a scotch maker tried to be as efficient as possible, they’d make crappy-tasting scotch. But at least they’d be making it quickly, right?

The same goes for movies, books, and TV. You can tell when there was maximum effort put on efficiency and minimum effort put on crafting a good story. Both Obsession and Backrooms were surprisingly popular movies from young, generally unknown directors. They didn’t rely on (or even use) AI to make the process easier. They wrote every word. They used largely practical effects.

An athlete can’t get better at their sport by just “being efficient.” They need to work hard to get better. Swinging a baseball bat as hard as possible (instead of working on an effective swing) ends in a strikeout more often than a home run. Throwing the football as far as possible as soon as the QB gets it (instead of planning effective plays against the defense) will result in an interception more often than a touchdown.

In other words: if you’re taking shortcuts to make everything as easy as possible, you’re doing something anyone can do. And that doesn’t make you stand out.

How To Free Up Your Time to Create Something Great

So what should you do instead? Use AI (or whatever) to automate the tasks. That will give you the time you need to do the hard things.

Here are some ideas:

1. Call debriefs: Pull action items into your task manager and gather voice of customer for marketing, products, and services.
2. Content ideas from actual questions: Have Claude review your calls and any podcast guest appearances you do for questions that might make good content for your channels.
3. Content publishing: Upload podcast episodes, copy, and artwork to your podcast host. Same can go for articles you’ve written, or other forms of content.
4. Create SOPs: Do a screen recording of you performing a task, narrating everything, and have AI generate an SOP for you.

By letting AI look for patterns, generate text from primary sources, and move files around from one place to another, you have the time and space to do the hard work.

I could have asked Claude what to write for this newsletter. As a thought exercise, after the first draft of this newsletter, I did. The suggestions were OK, and I could have been done in 30 minutes instead of 2 hours. But they were kind of sterile.

Statistical analysis of largely text-based memory makes no room for serendipity.