Your effort is the point

How do you get good at anything? They said, ten thousand hours of doing it day in and day out.

Well, not this time.

With AI, especially generative AI, humanity’s attempt of 'getting good at anything' has blown out of the roof. You don’t need ten thousand hours to get good at something just to create what you want. If you had taken your 'inability' to create something as a problem before, that's not a problem anymore now. Those were the specific set of 'problems' most of you didn’t really put in the effort to solve or didn't realize it was your problem. For most, it might not even be a problem.

Take for example, most of you didn’t see not being able to write essays or poems or make artworks as a real problem if you weren’t good at it. Maybe you were great at writing code but sucked terribly at writing a romantic poem. Still, it wasn’t the end of the world. You realized your capabilities, the things you were good at, the things you were bad at, and just moved on with your life. Maybe you tried working on improving it, but at the end of the day, you either gave up, knowing that writing a good poem wasn’t your problem to solve, or if things turned out great, it really was your problem to solve and you learned to write a better one.

Then came AI aka generative AI.

Suddenly, almost everything that was once not possible for you because of the skills you lacked didn’t matter anymore. The problems that didn’t bother you before now started screaming answers. Just type in a prompt and solve your problem of writing a poem, making an artwork, or coding a product.

AI is the solution to a problem that never was. You just made it your problem and let AI be your solver. Yes, you got your solution to your problem, but at what cost?

If you treat your 'inability' to do something as a problem and let AI shortcut it, you’ll neither grow past that inability nor learn the skill. You’ll be just masking the problem, not solving it.

But not being able to write that poem wasn’t your real problem. Your real problem was whether you were willing to put in the effort or not. Whether you were willing to sit with the discomfort, to fumble through a first draft, to write a few lines.

Your effort is the point.

The effort is what teaches you how to do it. The hours you spend trying, failing, and adjusting until something finally clicks, that’s how you get good at anything. Do you need ten thousand hours of this? Of course not. But the effort of going through the process? Yes, you do.

Your only effort is in making AI give you the output you want, but the outcome you need -- the skills, the confidence, the creativity -- only comes from the effort you put in and the process you go through.

I get it, not everything you build/create requires you to put in effort of learning the process, you could just 'AI' that. But I also know you already know, AI is helping you in your quest for creation but is also the aforementioned evil menace to humanity’s thinking and learning capacity.

The trend I'm seeing is lot of starters (in professions), and even professionals, giving up at the mercy of AI, shortcutting and getting comfortable with the output with less effort. While it sure does take a shorter time to get things done, in the long run, we’ll end up being less capable than we were.

Your effort was the point and has always been. AI didn’t change that. It just made it easier for you to forget. And what are you doing about it?