Shortcuts Are Like Sugar
Shortcuts are like sugar. They make you feel good in the short-term but aren’t good for you in the long-term. Your addiction to them sneaks up on you in a drug like manner. Moreover, even though everyone knows that they are bad for you, popular culture still markets them to you like they are good. Therefore, they are hard to resist.
Indeed, while sugar leads to diseases of the body, shortcuts lead to diseases of the mind.
The Shortcut Mindset
Your mindset is a thought pattern that directly impacts how you lead your life. There are several mindsets that have positive benefits backed by research. For example, the growth mindset and the strategic mindset. While there is no definitive body of research on the shortcut mindset like these other two, anecdotally you could ask any psychologist, coach, or teacher and they would agree the shortcut mindset leads to negative outcomes.
The shortcut mindset is one in which you prefer to skip experience for the sake of getting to outcomes faster. Furthermore, when someone has a shortcut mindset, they never learn how to enjoy the journey. The problem with not learning how to enjoy the journey because of the focus on faster is that it causes you to miss out on the learning from experiencing the long path.
Coach John Wooden has a great quote on shortcuts that illustrates this point.
Wooden states:
If you’re working on finding a shortcut, the easy way, you’re not working hard enough on the fundamentals. You may get away with it for a spell, but there is no substitute for the basics. And the first basic is good, old-fashioned hard work.
This in turn fosters impatience as well as limits one’s ability to learn from experience. Impatience is a character trait that has significant consequences. Impatience causes people to quit too soon in the face of adversity, which ultimately leads to missed opportunities.
Similarly, when one compromises their ability to learn from experience because they are impatiently looking for a shortcut, they miss out on picking up critical life skills. Skills such as assessing and using feedback, self-efficacy, and the fundamentals of planning.
Unquestionably, having a shortcut mindset is detrimental. Just like temporarily getting energy from a sugar high will never be the same as getting energy from a healthy balanced meal, temporarily getting ahead with shortcuts will never be the same as getting the opportunity to learn new skills by taking your time.