Why we need shortcuts (and longcuts)

Shortcuts get a bad rap.

In school, our teachers preached against them, warning us that looking for shortcuts would stunt our brains and make us lazy later in life.

Football coaches admonish their players to avoid taking the easy route. According to their infinite wisdom, there is no shorter path to glory, no easy trick to winning, no way to jump to the top of the podium.

All our lives, we have been drilled to look down on shortcuts with the utmost disdain.

But the truth, however, is a bit different….

The innovator’s gift

Imagine the world we would live in if we always took the longest route. What progress would we ever see in society if we consistently turned away from the possibility of doing things quicker, cheaper or more efficiently?

Taking the shortcut is how the world moves forward.

Generations of innovators down through history have subtly revealed the truth that our parents and teachers and coaches did not want us to know: shortcuts are a good thing (sometimes).

Every new innovation - from the automobile to the internet to the wristwatch - was created by someone who defied conventional wisdom and found a way to help the world “get ahead.”

Startup founders set out every day to solve a problem for their potential clients. Very often that problem is simply the “old way of doing things.”

It is fair to say that one of Silicon Valley’s greatest gifts to mankind has been to bless the “shortcut seekers” with enough financial success that the mere act of “looking for an easier way” has now become normalized and even celebrated.

Showing (or rather selling) someone the shortcut becomes the very basic foundation of a successful company. And if you can lead the mass market through that shortcut, you end up not only building a successful product and company, but you can change the world in the process.

Because people love shortcuts - and once they find one or see someone else taking one, they will flock to follow.

The road less taken

But our teachers - whom we both loved and hated - were also right.

After all, they are older, wiser and smarter than the children they teach. So there must be a reason that generation after generation of them encourage their pupils to “do the work” and take the proverbial “longcut.”

Why?

For one thing, it is much harder to recognize the power and profit of a shortcut if you have never had to take the long way.

Doing the hard work up front, when it is least comfortable, makes the mind more curious about how to do things better, faster and more efficiently down the road.

But more broadly, we need “longcuts” because the world would be a mess without them.

If every house was built as fast and cheaply as possible, we would all live in disgusting little shacks by the side of the road.

If commuters on their way to work in the morning constantly looked for ways to shave 5 seconds off their drive, the roads would be chaos.

Thankfully, there are craftsmen, statesmen, mothers and fathers, teachers, coaches and many, many more who take their time to “do it right” - even if it requires extra patience and effort.

Their contribution to the world and to the state of the world is to create things that last.

Taking the longcut - as hard and as maddening as it may be - can help ensure stability and security even as the world moves forward.

Where to find them

In the end, we need both shortcuts and longcuts.

A balance between efficiency and quality is always in our best interests.

And if Silicon Valley epitomizes the progress that shortcut-seeking innovators have gifted the world, then Switzerland symbolizes the longcut approach.

While tech founders and their venture capital backers thrive on pushing the envelope and finding new (better) ways of doing things, the Swiss excel at long-term thinking and carefully coordinated progres.

The same goes for Swiss politicians and diplomats - with the recent Swiss-Indian free trade agreement (15 years in the making) as one example.

And perhaps no place better embodies the “longcut approach” than the World Economic Forum in Davos. Every year, global politicians, business big-wigs and many others descend on the Swiss mountain town to discuss, debate and - ostensibly - “improve the state of the world.”

Of course, critics point out that there have rarely been any concrete actions resulting from the annual WEF pow-wows.

They are not wrong.

But then again, that is the nature of a shortcut: it is easy to see both point A and point B and how you get from one to the other.

A longcut takes...much longer...making it significantly more difficult to see when things started and when they are finished. Those who look for shortcuts coming out of WEF and other similar gatherings are missing the point.

So while we are often taught to shun the shortcut and we naturally scorn the longcut…

…there is no way around the fact that we need both.