For pretty much all my life I assumed that being in great shape required going to the gym for an hour every day. More = better, that is how I thought it worked. So thats what I did.

Then I asked my kid brother (the most ripped guy I know) about his workout routine. He casually told me he only goes to the gym 3 times a week, only does 1 set of each exercise, and does them to failure. His workouts take 30min max. This blew my mind.

How can a guy - with the exact same genes as me - have 15lb more muscle than I do, while also spending like 70% less time exercising than me?? It made no sense. But then I started doing his routine and the same happened for me.

This was a lesson for me. I assumed ‘good’ required ‘a lot’. But it really doesnt. Good depends on how you spend the time. I think about this constantly - it applies to everything.

I think theres a misconception with how most people frame ‘work’ - if something is important, it should take a long time and a lot of effort. Time/Effort should be proportional to importance; if it didnt take long then it probably wasnt done well.

This has been a genuine source of anxiety for me. I know I have something important to do tomorrow (proposal, client delivery, pitch deck, etc) and I will assume that it should take me all afternoon, bc thats what ‘taking it seriously’ should look like.

Then I’ll start working on it, and Ill get 90% of it done in 30min. The rest of the time is generally spent procrastinating beforehand and then fiddling with tiny details after.

Its like a protestant work ethic version of imposter syndrome - if the output came too quickly you assume corners were cut. But what if the work is just… done? and the clock is irrelevant?

I think about this with business models too. For a long time ‘premium’ = expensive and slow. Pay a consulting firm to throw 10ppl at a problem for 30hrs and deliver a deck. The output wasnt necessarily better because it took 300 man hours. But the effort itself was part of what you bought; the weight + seriousness.

Now AI is blowing this up in real time.

Things that used to require teams and weeks now take one person + Claude and an afternoon. The bottleneck never was intelligence/quality it was the logistics, coordination, meetings about meetings. The overhead of humans trying to align on something that one person with the right idea in their brain can just do.

Building YTSponsorDB.com we are experiencing this firsthand. Were a small team doing work that wouldve required 3x the headcount 2 years ago. Done good, done fast, done cheap (until recently having all 3 of these felt like it would violate some law of physics). Turns out that ‘fast, cheap, good - pick two’ thing was more of a skill issue.

I think were entering an era where the formula for time spend and quality produced is being fundamentally reexamined. That is uncomfortable for many people. Especially those of us who were taught that effort IS the point.

The answer, amigo, is not effort. The OUTPUT is the point. Its the whole point. Effort is the means to the output end.

My little brother doesnt work out less because he is lazy. He works out less because hes figured out what actually moved the needle, and doesnt waste time on the rest. [here is the actual routine if youre curious, he stole it from Mr Olympia Mike Mentzer]

Thats not a shortcut, its intelligence.

Now… this may not apply to everything. There are things in life where time is the ingredient of course (not just the vehcile). Ex: you cant rush deep friendship and good relationships. You cant compress years it takes to master an art. You cant automate ‘wisdom’ I know this.

Art / relationships / mastery - these still demand patience. Theres a strong case to be made that these will be the only jobs left post-AI. They demand showing up over and over again, even when progress is invisible.

I guess the distinction is between tasks and journeys.
> Tasks can be optimized
> Journeys cannot
> Knowing which is half the battle

But for the 100 small/medium things you do every week - emails, strategies, decisions, workouts - good dont need to take long. It just needs to be good.

Note to self: stop letting the clock tell you whether your work matters.

Peace,
Ramsey