Imagine you’re going skydiving and the coach offers you 2 options:

1. You can use the parachute and pull it when it’s time to slow your descent and land safely.
2. You can forgo the parachute and land as fast as possible.

Spoiler alert: if you go with Option 2, you will die. You do not want to hit the ground as fast as possible.

In a baseball game, when the shortstop rushes the throw on a routine ground ball, he risks overthrowing it, allowing the batter to reach.

If a cook makes scrambled eggs on a stove top set to high instead of medium, they will burn the eggs.

Going faster yields a worse result.

But one of the most common arguments for using AI is, “it makes me do my work faster.”

“I can produce faster,” “I wrote my book in 3 days instead of 3 months,” “I can do more cold outreach faster.”

Faster doesn’t matter if what you’re doing is garbage.

The cook wouldn’t say, “the eggs taste bad but I made them half the time.” The shortstop wouldn’t say, “The runner reached but at least I threw it 10mph faster than I usually do.”

The skydiver wouldn’t say anything because they’re dead.

Don’t Sacrifice Quality for Speed

I just finished reading Toxic Grit by Amanda Goetz, and there’s a lot of great stuff in the book. I recommend it, as well as her appearance on my podcast.

One big, important thing she mentions is that recent generations more than any other has “Performance-Based Rewards” ingrained into us.

That idea creates a cycle of doing more, achieving more, and doing it faster, bigger, better.

AI feeds into this cycle. When you tie your self-worth to performance, and more, faster gets equated to better performance, you start to rely on AI to help you “perform” better.

But here’s the thing about “better”: faster isn’t better. Better is better.

You need to think about why you’re doing something, and what would make it better.

If you’re running a footrace, sure, faster is better.

If you’re traveling by air and arrive ahead of schedule, I’d say faster is usually better.

When you are crafting something — a book, sales copy, a relationship — faster isn’t better. Faster is worse.

Doing Bad Work Faster is a Waste of Time

If you do bad work faster, you’re not moving in the right direction. The cook has wasted eggs — or even worse, tarnished their reputation.

The shortstop has allowed a runner to reach, extending the inning — or worse, cost his team runs.

The skydiver is dead.

Instead of doing garbage work faster for the sake of saying it’s faster, create space in your life to do higher quality work.

Use AI as the tool to help, not be the craftsman. I’m using it to proof this article for grammar. What I’m not using it for is any wording. AI wrote 0% of this article.

Use automation to take menial, repetitive tasks off your plate. Use delegation to remove jobs you don’t need to perform.

THEN you will have the time and space to put real effort into the tasks that deserve it.

In a world where everyone is trying to do things faster, you can stand out by doing them better.