You are too good for your own good.

There’s something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. We’ve become obsessed with efficiency so much so that we’re stripping away the very thing that makes anything worth doing in the first place.

Take any work scenario today. There are deadlines. Always a need to deliver in the shortest time possible. So we start thinking: what’s the fastest way to get this done? We look for a direct path, the shortest route between point A and point B, and we execute. Then we move on to the next thing. And the next. And the next.

And at first glance, that makes sense. That’s how we’re supposed to work, right? But I’ve realized something, the moment we optimize purely for speed, we lose something critical: that messy, meandering, inefficient phase where we ramble. The part where we absorb, explore, and fumble through ideas.

Let’s talk about Leonardo da Vinci. This man, this genius, spent years learning how to draw feathers. Imagine that. Just feathers. Not even whole birds, not flight, not even anatomy. Just feathers. He obsessed over them. And when he was later asked to work on a massive engineering project, what did he do? He spent even more time building a clear version, a simplified model, to understand how to work with objects at that magnitude. Michelangelo laughed at him. Thought it was a waste of time. And yet, that period of deliberate inefficiency, of playing, of experimenting, of seeming like he was wasting time, was everything.

That’s the part we’re losing.

You want to write an article about apples? You read only articles about apples. You consume every existing thought on apples and then—what do you write? Another article that sounds just like every other article about apples. The same tired facts, the same predictable angles. Nothing new. Nothing unexpected.

But the old way of research was different. You wouldn’t just read about apples. You’d stumble upon a 16th-century farmer’s journal. You’d read about the evolution of trade routes that brought apples to different continents. You’d read something completely unrelated—maybe about Isaac Newton sitting under an apple tree—and suddenly, a new thought emerges. Something no one else has written before. That’s how new ideas are born. Not from hyper-efficiency, but from wandering.

And this doesn’t just apply to research. It applies to mastery itself.

We all want to be fast and good. But fast and good isn’t a starting point. It’s an end result. The only way to get there is to first be slow and bad. Painfully slow. Embarrassingly bad. And then, over time, as you work, as you iterate, as you produce more and more, you begin to close that gap. The process goes something like this:

Stage 1: Very bad, very slow

Stage 2: Less bad, still slow

Stage 3: Good, getting faster

Stage 4: Very good, very fast

But that first stage? The stage where everything you make is garbage? That’s the part no one wants to sit through. That’s the part people want to skip. But you can’t. You have to get through the bad before you get to the good. Like turning on a rusty tap. At first, all that comes out is brown, murky water. But you have to let it run. You have to let all the dirty water flush out before the clear, clean water starts flowing.

And here’s the problem with skipping that phase. When you refuse to be bad, you trap yourself in a loop of mediocrity. You try to optimize too early, cutting corners and hacking your way through, thinking you’re being efficient. But all you’re doing is stunting your own growth. You’re over-optimizing and under-developing.

Niche knowledge is valuable. But when you specialize too early, before giving yourself time to meander, you lock yourself into a box. You become the kind of person who can only think in one way.

The question is: how do you tell this to your boss when he needs that design done in 15 minutes? How do you balance this messy, necessary process with the reality of tight deadlines?

This is where structured environments like internships used to help. The whole point was to put you in a space where you could be bad and slow without catastrophic consequences. You’d be given manageable tasks, just enough to stretch you but not break you. Over time, you’d bridge the gap. But these days, in a place like Nigeria, you’re just thrown straight into the deep end. There’s no slow, safe period. Just pressure. Just expectations.

And sure, some high-agency people take that process into their own hands. They create their own slow period, their own messy experimental phase. But that takes discipline. Because you have to be willing to sit in the discomfort of being bad. To open the tap and let the dirty water run out.

That’s also why you need a side project.

Because if your main job demands efficiency, if you’re constantly being asked to produce things fast and good, then where’s your space to be bad and slow? Where do you practice, where do you explore, where do you experiment without consequence?

Your side project is that space. It’s the place where you can make terrible work in peace. Where you can test ideas, follow random threads of curiosity, build skills with no pressure. It’s your playground. Your lab. The place where you can open that rusty tap and let the dirty water run until it starts coming out clean.

There’s no shortcut to mastery.

And yet, we’re obsessed with finding one. We call it optimization, but really, it’s avoidance. We don’t want to sit with our bad work. We don’t want to feel the gap between our taste and our ability. But that gap is exactly what tells you that you can get better. That you should get better. And the only way to close it is to keep producing.

At first, everything you make will be awful. And you’ll know it’s awful. Because your taste is already high. You know what good looks like. But you have to push through. You have to let the bad run its course.

And one day, without realizing it, you’ll look at what you made and think: this isn’t bad.

Then, a little later, you’ll think, this is actually good.

And then, much later, you’ll realize you can produce something fast and good.

But before you can get there, you have to first stop being bad.