When building companies, products, or engaging in any creative endeavor, the correlation between time invested and value created is surprisingly small.
Someone who dedicates one hour to the truly highest-impact action will outperform someone who spends ten hours on less important tasks.
To maximize the effectiveness of every unit of time (input), it's beneficial to spend it thinking deeply about the highest-impact action and then executing it. Typically, finding an answer is easier than asking the right question.
This low correlation between time and value creation will likely become even more pronounced with the rise of modern AI models.
This weak relationship seems counterintuitive to humans.
For decades, the dominant paradigms have opposed this idea. With manual labor, there was a high correlation between time and value. However, as more complex forms of leverage (such as code and media) become available, this correlation weakens. Consequently, our thinking needs to evolve.