AI productivity gurus are selling you the wrong superpower
Why being less precious about your work beats speed every time
I just finished this article after a couple hours of major revisions. Right before publishing, I ran it through my content scoring system and got a 60/100. My passing score is 80.
For a split second, I thought "fuck it, let's go with it."
Then I threw the whole thing away and started over. This article you're reading? That's version 5.
Feels like every AI productivity guru on LinkedIn would call me insane. They'd say I should have just "iterated faster" with AI prompts, published the 60/100 version and moved on to the next post. "Optimize for speed, use AI!"
Here's what they're all missing: AI's real superpower isn't speed. It's making you less precious about your work. And that psychological shift produces better output than speed ever could.
The productivity theater performers have this completely backward. They're optimizing for the wrong metric.
If you only have 5 minutes: here are the key points
The common belief that AI's main value is speed is flawed—its real power lies in reducing emotional attachment to your early drafts.
Letting go of suboptimal work becomes easier with AI, leading to higher-quality outcomes even if it takes the same amount of time.
Productivity influencers often misread success as velocity, when the real unlock is freedom from the sunk cost fallacy.
The author’s shift: from optimizing output speed to ruthlessly discarding mediocre ideas—resulting in fewer but significantly better results.
Quality isn't born from faster creation, but from psychological distance and iteration without ego.
The speed cult is wrong
Let me be clear about who I'm talking about. The AI productivity influencers selling courses on "prompt engineering for 10x output." The startup founders bragging about shipping features faster with Claude. The content creators posting before/after screenshots of their "AI-enhanced workflow."
They're all chasing velocity while missing the actual revolution happening right under their noses.
Take the classic productivity guru promise: "I used to spend 8 hours writing a blog post, now I do it in 30 minutes!" What they don't tell you is that the 30-minute version reads like every other AI-generated content piece on the internet. Generic, safe, forgettable.
But here's what actually happened to me after a year of heavy AI usage across product management, marketing, and writing: I still spend about 8 hours on quality work. The difference isn't speed—it's that I'm no longer emotionally attached to preserving my first attempts.
That tiny shift changes everything.
The attachment trap that kills creative work
Before AI, I was terrible at throwing away work. As Head of Marketing at Arch, I'd spend six hours crafting a campaign concept, and even when it was mediocre, those six hours had me by the throat. The sunk cost fallacy made me optimize around that constraint instead of optimizing for the best possible outcome.
Professional writers understand this. They can spend eight hours on a chapter, then simply delete it and start fresh the next day. Amateurs can't stomach that loss.
AI broke me out of this trap, but not how you'd expect.
When I generate content with AI, I'm not physically typing every word myself. That tiny bit of physical separation creates massive psychological distance from the work. Even though I'm still doing the thinking, strategizing, and decision-making, the fact that I didn't personally craft every sentence makes me dramatically less attached to preserving it.
It's like the difference between a building architect and the construction crew. The architect can order walls torn down much easier than the people who physically built them.
How this actually plays out
Here's a concrete example that the speed gurus would completely misunderstand:
Last year, I spent four hours building a complete marketing campaign around a meme format—CTAs, landing page copy, messaging hierarchy, the works. Then I used AI to evaluate the final result and realized the message wasn't strong enough for our ICP.
In the old world, those four hours would have anchored me to a mediocre campaign. I would have tweaked around the edges, trying to salvage the investment.
With AI, I trashed everything and spent another three hours building an entirely different approach around a stronger concept. The campaign performed significantly better.
The productivity gurus would focus on the wrong metric: "Seven hours total? That's not 10x faster!"
They'd miss the real story: I shipped a high-quality campaign instead of optimizing a mediocre one. The constraint isn't time—it's psychological attachment to suboptimal work.
The math they don't understand
Here's what the speed cult gets wrong about iteration: AI creation might produce lower quality than what I'd write myself on the first try, but having more iterations always beats having one "perfect" attempt.
Ten decent attempts will outperform one carefully crafted attempt almost every time.
But here's the key: you can only access this advantage if you're willing to discard substantial work. Most people can't. They get four hours into something and think, "I have to make this work."
AI doesn't just make iteration faster—it makes iteration feel costless. When you're not emotionally invested in preserving your work, you're free to pursue the best possible outcome rather than defending the one you happened to create first.
Faster horses
The productivity influencers are selling you faster horses when the revolution is actually cars.
Creator's block—whether in writing, marketing, or product management—is fundamentally about attachment to suboptimal work. We get stuck because we've invested time and energy into something that isn't quite right, but isn't obviously wrong enough to abandon.
AI breaks this cycle not by making you faster, but by making you ruthless.
I now trash roughly 200 article concepts per year. Before AI, I would have forced weak ideas into publication because of the time invested in developing them. The math is simple: publishing one great piece beats publishing five mediocre ones.
The result? I ship higher-quality work, not more work. Same resource constraints—time, attention, strategic thinking—but I'm no longer psychologically anchored to my first attempts.
What the gurus miss
Every time someone shows me their "10x faster AI workflow," I see the same pattern: they're optimizing for output volume while their quality stays constant or decreases.
That's not 10x productivity. That's 10x busy work.
The real breakthrough is escaping the sunk cost fallacy that cripples creative work. When generation feels costless, quality becomes the only constraint that matters.
The creative paradox is real: I've done better work since I started throwing it away.
AI didn't just give us a faster way to create—it gave us the psychological freedom to create without fear. The productivity gurus can keep their speed metrics. I'll take the revolution they can't even see.