Being fast and good is a superpower

I recently read James Somers’ insightful blog post about the compounding impact of being fast at your work¹.

Somers noted that being fast doesn’t imply you should do sloppy work, but he didn’t go far enough on the importance of quality².

Fast is rare. High quality is rare. Being fast at high quality work is a superpower.

If you’ve ever done work around your house, then later watched a professional do the same work, you’ve had this revelation. I have the ability to lay tile myself, but getting it right takes me a long time and a lot of rework. The professional’s level of skill is impressive, but I notice the speed more than anything: they can do better work in a fraction of the time.

If you develop this superpower, you will set yourself far apart from others in your profession.

I’ll refer to people capable of high quality work as “good” in this post, because that’s how they are often described (“he’s really good”).

Why fast and good?

Being fast and good creates leverage and insulates you from disruption. I’m writing through the lens of knowledge work (my world), but these principles apply generally.

Leverage

First, being fast and good creates economic leverage, now and in the future.

In the near term, your effective hourly rate increases (all other things being equal). If two people with the same wage produce the same work product at the same level of quality, but one can do it in 40 hours versus the other taking 60 or 80 hours, the faster worker has a much better dollars-per-hour ratio.

Over the long term, you’ll be able to command a higher wage because so few people are fast and good.

Second, being fast and good creates career leverage.

If you can do 60 hours of quality work in 40 hours, the amount of good work you can produce in 60 hours will far surpass your peers. Whether you choose to work longer hours or optimize for balance, your ROI on additional work time will be extremely high. That leverage is extremely useful when you want to advance your career, switch roles, change jobs, learn a new skill, work on a side project or start your own business.

Beyond output, being fast and good builds you the kind of reputation that opens opportunities.

Third, being fast and good creates management leverage.

Being a manager is hard, in large part because leading well requires investing significant time in people. But most managers also have to produce some kind of work, or, at a minimum, guide, evaluate and justify the work of their team.

If you’re fast and good, you not only have more time to invest (while still producing), but your team will respect you more and work harder to keep up. If the boss seems to have a superpower, everyone will dig in to rise to the same level (or make it clear they can’t, which is equally as valuable to know).

Insulation

Being fast and good is a hedge against volatility. When economies, industries, or individual businesses face significant change or difficulty, the belt gets tightened. When management has to make decisions about who to keep around, they rightly choose the most high-leverage people.

AI is playing out this kind of volatility in real-time. If you’re fast and good, and leveraging AI to make you even faster, you can face the current uncertainty with a much higher level of confidence.

Most people aren’t on the leverage curve

There are upper bounds to the leverage and insulation being fast and good afford you. You can only work so many hours before burning out and everyone is replaceable.

But in my experience, most people optimize for fast, quality, or politics, meaning they don’t make it on to the leverage curve to begin with—and AI is making that distinction increasingly clear.

Footnotes

1. James Somers' article, Speed matters: why working quickly is more important than it seems, argues that being fast at a task lowers the perceived cost of accomplishing that task, meaning you're more likely to perform the task. ↩

2. Somers does point out that simply doing a task more often will make you better at it, which is true. Repetition is part of building expertise. But we’ve all worked with fast people whose output is mediocre. More mediocre output isn't a differentiator and will be tolerated less as AI makes true craftspeople faster. ↩