Slow is not a quality setting. Just ask my werewolf.

The greatest lie a teacher ever told me took about four seconds to say.

I was in high school, in my first real art class. I had been drawing my whole life. It was the one thing I was naturally, unfairly good at. So walking into an actual art class felt like a basketball kid getting his first real gym. Finally. A place to use the gift and get better.

One of the first assignments was to draw the face of a character. I drew a werewolf. A good werewolf. Fangs, fur, menace, the works. We pinned our drawings on the wall, and my classmates were dazzled. I was proud. Quietly. Mostly.

Then the teacher walked over and asked a question I had heard many, many times before.

"How long did that take you?"

I loved this question. Every single person who had ever asked it reacted the same way. Gobsmacked. "Wow, you did that so fast? That's amazing." Without fail. Without exception. Speed was my party trick. So I told her, bracing for applause, with the confidence only a teenager can muster: "About 45 minutes."

She nodded and said, "Oh. Well, then you need to spend more time on it."

That was it. No note about the line work. No comment on the composition. Just a stopwatch review. The werewolf was apparently good, but not good enough to justify itself in under an hour.

Complete baloney.

Complete baloney.

The same lie, with a diploma

I would love to say that was a one-off. It was not.

In college I heard it again, about my artwork and about my writing. Different professors. Same idea. If it came easily, it could not be that good. If it came quickly, I must have skipped something.

Here is the thing. My brain moves at an above-average pace. I did not earn that. I did not train for it. It just came that way, like my hairline and my opinions about cheap zippers. I am not smart about everything I do. Ask my kids. But I am smart enough to take full advantage of the one gear I was given. So my creative output has generally come faster than a lot of my peers.

And for years, people kept trying to put a speed governor on it.

Why smart people fall for it

They called it the effort heuristic. I call it the werewolf problem.

They called it the effort heuristic. I call it the werewolf problem.

We are wired to use effort as a shortcut for quality, because quality is hard to judge and hours are easy to count. Most of the time that shortcut is harmless. It becomes a problem when we start punishing people for being efficient.

Now the critics have ring lights

Then AI showed up, and guess who came back.

My high school art teacher. My college professors. Same lines, new faces. Except now they post daily, have followers, and a lot more confidence in their lighting setup. The message has not changed one bit. Slow down. Do it the hard way. If it was easy, it does not count.

I disagreed at sixteen. I disagree louder now.

To be fair, there is a real exception. Exercises built for personal growth should be done the slow way. Scales on a piano. Gesture drawings. Writing a sentence fifty times until it sings. That is training, and training is supposed to be hard.

But the work itself? The deliverable? Speed, effort, and time spent have nothing to do with the quality of the output. Nothing. If you can deliver great work in a fraction of the time, you should not be dragged into someone else's calendar just because you got there first.

I have seen this movie before

This is not my first new tool. It is not even my fifth.

I embraced digital photography while people were still defending the darkroom like it was a national park. I embraced stock photography while others insisted every image had to be shot from scratch, by hand, during golden hour, after a long talk with the model about her motivation. I embraced the Adobe Creative Suite, the microprocessor, and the mouse, which at the time was considered a very suspicious little plastic animal.

Every one of them made life better. Every one of them made the output faster. None of them were wrong.

AI is not wrong either.

Somewhere out there, a werewolf drawn in 45 minutes is still better than one drawn in four hours. He would like you to know that. Then he would like to get back to work. He is very efficient.

Somewhere out there, a werewolf drawn in 45 minutes is still better than one drawn in four hours.