This post was originally written in Italian by Paolo Gambardella. It has been translated by an AI agent and may contain inaccuracies.
Lately it feels like mistakes aren’t just piling up — they’re compounding exponentially. New technologies let us get from point A to point B sometimes almost instantly. But that very thing makes us miss out on opportunities that could turn out to be essential.
Imagine that this weekend you decide to visit a museum in your city. Imagine you have a helicopter at your disposal that picks you up from home and takes you straight there. A helicopter ride is fun (I assume — I’ve never been on one), so let’s say the price you pay is falling asleep for the journey. The upside is that you arrive at your destination immediately. But you lose everything else along the way: if you’d walked, you might have bumped into an old friend en route. Or, who knows, stumbled across a café doing a great breakfast. Or spotted a sign announcing the opening of another cultural centre and decided to head there instead. Sure, walking is more tiring, and slower — but it’s full of possibilities.
Right, well — in game design today you can generate a feature spec almost instantly. Your boss tells you to work on a feature, gives you a week, and within two hours you’ve already got a solid base to work from. All thanks to algorithms built essentially on probability, running on enormously powerful hardware, capable of producing structured, reasonably coherent documentation in next to no time. Far less time than you or I would need, that’s for sure.
The problem is what gets lost along the way: the chance to discover other things, to pick up new ideas and angles. But your boss gave you a week and you’re delivering in two days, so your OKR is probably going to look great — even if what you’re not doing is actually discovering anything new.
So where does that leave us? My own preference is pretty clear. For me, a true professional needs to take the time to do things properly — creativity needs constraints, yes, but it also needs time.