It is only your creative pride that says, “If it came easily, it doesn’t really count.” Real work is supposed to be hard. If you found a faster way to get there, some shortcut to success, some part of you suspects you cheated. Hard work gets results. Cheats never prosper. The proverbial sayings flow easily.

My brain meats thought that for longer than I’d like to admit. And it cost me a lot of creative time I didn’t … have time for!

Why We Resist the Easier Way

There’s a genuine psychological reason this belief is so persistent, and it’s not just stubbornness or a latent Protestant work ethic. Researchers have identified the effort heuristic: the tendency to judge something as more valuable simply because it took a long time to create and/or was harder work to produce. In one well-known study, people rated a poem, a painting, and even a piece of art more highly when they believed it took more time and effort to make, regardless of the actual quality of the finished piece.

This bias doesn’t just affect how we judge other people’s work. It affects how we judge our own. If a piece came together quickly, some part of us quietly discounts it. If it was a struggle, we assume that struggle must mean something. There’s a related idea called the IKEA effect: people consistently value things more highly when they built them themselves, effort included, even when a professionally made equivalent would objectively be better.

None of this means hard work doesn’t matter. It absolutely does; practice and persistence are how skill develops in the first place. But it does mean our instinct to distrust the easier path isn’t a reliable signal about quality. It’s often just an emotional response that we believe as fact.

What a Shortcut Actually Is

So, we need to retrain the headspace neurons. A genuine shortcut isn’t cutting a corner. It’s someone else’s hard-won solution, or your own, made readily available.

Presets, templates, and proven workflows exist because someone already solved a problem you’re currently solving from scratch. A colour grading preset represents hours of someone else’s calibration work. A well-built chord progression template represents decades of harmonic convention that actually works. A tested structure for a piece of writing represents thousands of pieces that came before yours, refined down to what holds attention.

Using one of these isn’t about skipping the learning. It’s borrowing expertise you haven’t had time to build yet, so your own effort can go where it’s actually needed: the parts of the work only you can make, your creativity,

Professional editors who build preset libraries report saving five to fifteen hours a week using them for repetitive parts of the process. That’s not five to fifteen hours of laziness. That’s five to fifteen hours redirected toward the decisions that actually make the work distinctive.

The shortcut I resisted longest: using a template for the structural bones of a piece, rather than reinventing the structure every single time. Once I let myself use it, the actual writing improved, because I wasn’t spending energy solving a problem that had already been solved.

How to Tell a Good Shortcut From a Bad One

Not every shortcut is worth taking. Just ask the fairy tale character who gets lost in the woods. The distinction that actually matters isn’t effort versus ease. It’s what the shortcut is replacing.

A good shortcut replaces repetitive, solved problems: the technical setup, the structural scaffolding, the parts of the process that are the same every time regardless of what you’re making. Freeing yourself from those doesn’t reduce the work. It protects your creative energy for the parts that need it.

A bad shortcut replaces the part where you actually need to make decisions: the melody, the composition, the sentence that says the thing only you could say. Skip that, and you haven’t saved time. You’ve skipped the actual work.

The question worth asking honestly is:

Is this shortcut removing friction, or removing me?

What to Do Instead

Notice the resistance the next time you feel it. When you catch yourself avoiding an easier path out of some vague sense that it doesn’t count, ask where that feeling is actually coming from. Usually it’s the effort heuristic talking, not a genuine quality concern.

Build or find the templates and systems that handle your repetitive, solved problems. Use them without guilt. That’s not skipping the work. That’s making sure your effort goes where it can actually make a difference.

The parts of the process that deserve your full effort are the parts only you can do. Everything else is fair game for a shortcut.

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