Member-only story
The Illusion of Short Cuts: Take The Long Cut
A shortcut is an excuse to avoid the real work
Millions of people are obsessed with shortcuts. They look for shortcuts for almost every area of their lives.
And waste a lot of time, money and attention in the process.
It’s a distracting and disturbing trend.
Shortcuts are fallacies and illusions: detours that distract us from real work.
“If there were shortcuts, people smarter than you and me would have found them already. There aren’t. Sorry,” says Seth Godin.
Many people fall prey to shortcuts because the human brain is insanely good at conserving energy: it uses mental shortcuts (psychologists call it heuristics) to make quick judgments to avoid hard and important thinking.
Heuristics allow us to solve everyday problems quickly but they don’t always work in our favour though. It’s up to you to deliberately push past the brain’s cravings and choose a better path.
Shortcuts can only take you so far. And the price is usually long delays that require twice the time to get you moving again.
In the end, you will most likely end up where you started.
