Here are a few obvious things:

If you want to write better, then write more.
If you want to improve reporting, do the work to clean the data.
If you want to be a better manager, meet with your people.
If you want to test an idea, talk to your customers.

Nothing radical there.

And yet, its never been more easy to avoid the hard step. Instead of doing the thing, you search for ways around doing the thing under the tempting guise of finding a better way.

I find myself slipping into “optimize mode” all of the time. I’ll look at a new problem and jump to “There has to be a shortcut.” or “How do I make this easier? There has to be a thing to make this faster”

Generative AI tools make it even easier to fall into this thinking. “What if we just automate this? Skip this step and let ChatGPT write it?”

But this buries the point. The marketplace rewards quality. And quality is an output of clear thinking. Sure, ChatGPT can improve your process or provide a creative assist or edit. You should definitely use these tools.

But you first you need to discover where the weak spots are. These are uncovered by doing the work to know where the edges are. Differentiated results come from diving into the problem and wading though the surprising amount of detail beneath the surface.

There are no cheap tickets to mastery.