When I was in high school, shortcuts showed up as Cliff Notes and Evelyn Wood speed-reading classes—promising smarter, faster versions of ourselves without the messy middle. Today’s shortcuts are far sleeker: Artificial intelligence that drafts your thoughts before you’ve fully had them, and GLP-1 drugs that melt pounds without you having to renegotiate your entire relationship with food or stress.
Isn’t it provocative that, arguably, the two biggest innovations of our time are both about shortcuts?
What happened to the “show your work” mentality that I grew up with, thanks to my 7th grade math teacher?
There’s nothing inherently wrong with shortcuts. In fact, there are moments in midlife when they’re gifts. They save time, reduce friction, and free us to focus on what matters most. A shortcut can open a door you’ve been too exhausted—or overwhelmed—to push on your own. Sometimes a shortcut is simply a smarter path.
But every shortcut comes with a shadow side. When we outsource effort, we risk outsourcing growth. The long road—messy, irritating, slow—forces us to meet ourselves. We develop pattern recognition. We notice what triggers us, what energizes us, what keeps finding its way back into our lives like some cosmic sticky note saying, “You still haven’t dealt with this.” Wisdom doesn’t accumulate when things are easy; it accumulates when things take time.
Shortcuts can help us accelerate. But they can also help us avoid. And avoidance, whether mediated by AI or pharmaceuticals or a yellow-and-black Cliff Notes cover, rarely leads to transformation. As I like to remind myself: shortcuts often lead to dead ends.
The opportunity of this moment—this strange era where everything from weight loss to writing can be done “faster”—is to choose consciously. Ask: Is this shortcut giving me a boost, or stealing an essential part of the journey?
That’s not anti-technology. It’s pro-human.
-Chip