A long time ago, I signed up for my first Tai Chi classes. I had this idea that after a few months I would have progressed much more than I actually had. I imagined fluid movements, better balance, and the kind of calm you see in people who have been practicing for years. Instead, I was still struggling with the basics. My form was stiff. My breathing was off. I was frustrated.
One evening, I told my instructor I felt stuck. He looked at me and said one word: màn. And he repeated it two times, to make the message clear. In Chinese, 慢 (màn) means “slow.” Slow down. Do it slowly. No rush. That applies both to the form itself, because only by doing it slowly do you begin to notice the nuances, and to the results. Results take time. A lot of time. Easier said than done.
Years earlier, in a completely different context, my canon law professor had said something I never forgot. He said that our generation had lost the diachronic conception of time. We had stopped understanding that things unfold across a timeline, that causes precede effects, that learning has stages and seasons. Everything had become synchronic. Everything was now.
He was saying this in the early 2000s. If he could see us today, I think he would be speechless. Time has been compressed to the point of almost disappearing. The past feels irrelevant. The future feels too far away to matter. All that remains is the present, and even the present keeps shrinking. We consume information in seconds. We expect mastery in minutes. We measure growth in days.
Take AI. There is a growing belief that you can learn it in ten minutes by taking a quick course. That you can become a software developer through vibe coding, prompting your way to production-ready applications without understanding what is happening under the hood. That you can improvise as a designer, an engineer, or a strategist simply because the tools are accessible.
The tools are accessible. That part is true. And that is a good thing. But accessibility and mastery are two very different things. You can hand someone a Steinway piano, and they will still need years to play Chopin. The instrument does not replace the practice.
I work with AI every single day, and precisely because I spend so much time with these tools, I can say this with confidence: the learning curve is real. Learning how to get meaningful results, how to structure problems, how to evaluate outputs, and how to integrate AI into workflows that create real value for real people does not happen in ten minutes. Or ten hours. It takes consistent effort over time.
There is a metaphor I keep coming back to. You plant a seed in fertile soil. You water it, give it sunlight, and protect it from the elements. You do everything right. And still, it takes time to grow. You cannot yell at a seed and make it sprout faster. You cannot put it on a deadline. What you can do is force it beyond its natural rhythm. And yes, you may get something. It might even look impressive for a while. But growth on steroids is never healthy growth. The roots are shallow. The structure is weak. The first real storm brings everything down.
I am not arguing against speed. The tools we have today are extraordinary. AI is a multiplier that can make good professionals better and fast professionals faster. But a multiplier needs something to multiply. Zero times anything is still zero. If you skip the foundation, the multiplier has nothing to work with.
My Tai Chi instructor was right. My canon law professor was right. The things worth learning take time. The skills worth having require patience. And in a world that keeps telling you everything should be instant, choosing depth over speed is almost a radical act.
Rome was not built in a day. And neither is anything worth building.
