The Shortcut

One of my favorite games growing up was Mario Kart. I especially loved playing it with people who had never played before and taking the shortcuts within the game to come out ahead. Nothing quite compares to the feeling of seeing your character get further and further out in front due to your knowledge of the map and being able to flex that knowledge on the unsuspecting. 

I’m not sure if everybody else loved finding these shortcuts as much as I did but my guess would be yes because it seems like shortcuts to success are becoming continually more prevalent in our society. 

More interestingly, these shortcuts that people share often benefit the sharer more than those that are receiving the information because once the shortcuts are shared and many people try them, they become useless. 

This is much like taking the shortcuts in Mario Kart. When everybody takes the shortcut, you are hit with the somber reality that it is the skilled that ultimately come out on top because the shortcut ceases to offer a competitive advantage. 

I am grateful to be alive to experience the wisdom of the all knowing Mario. 

Seriously! We live in a great time to be alive. Not just for those that love gaming but for those pursuing personal success. 

There are seemingly infinite avenues to become successful. You can create products faster than ever before. You can then create social media channels and storefronts to market and sell said product faster than ever. 

Barriers to entry have never been lower. 

While this is great for those seeking to get started, it poses a unique challenge. There is also more competition than ever - especially in the social media spaces. 

This also results in redundant content being created and products that are almost identical with different branding. Beyond that, consumers seem to be less trusting (or at least this consumer) of new brands due to people recognizing the abundant opportunities to capitalize on people’s incessant need to impulse buy the stuff other people seem to be buying. 

This is especially prevalent with digital products where people are less and less trusting and willing to buy them as others have created horrendous products while charging a premium for them. 

You could do this right now. You could create a digital product to educate people on something that you are well-versed in and sell it for hundreds of dollars, potentially getting a few sales - maybe dozens of sales based on the size of your immediate audience. 

This may result in quick success but as people begin to recognize the product as overpriced relative to the value that they are getting, you are going to tarnish your brand. This is not an if, but a when. You may immediately be successful but you cutting corners and releasing a product that lacks value will catch up to you. 

It may take the release of numerous of these products for it to really sink in for your customers that they are being over-charged but your prioritizing short-term success by taking short cuts will catch up to you and it will result in your success being short-lived.

Kevin Hart talked about this in his book I Can’t Make This Up. He discussed how shortcuts have the ability to get you to your destination faster but it’s the long road that enables you to stay there longer once you get there. 

I immediately think of those working on growing a social media following to build their personal brand as I am working to do this as well. There are those that spend years creating value for their following - cultivating their brand and giving their followers a reason to engage with them (the path that I am following) and there are those that follow people en-mass to solicit the reciprocation of others to build their following as quickly as possible. They then post content that sounds nearly identical to large creators in their area of “expertise,” creating little value for those that followed the human need to reciprocate. 

Cue the disc scratching noise - I have a confession. 

I restarted my Twitter account at 0 followers and 0 following. On the first day of doing this, I saw how following others could rapidly build my following. I was able to convert around 20% of the people that I followed around my size to followers by simply engaging with a post or two of theirs (thoughtfully) and by following them. 

I went from 0 to 15 followers in a few days just from an hour’s worth of effort engaging this strategy. 

Initially, I was smacking my veins getting ready for the sweet hit of dopamine. I was able to convert this little effort into 15 followers? If I do this for a month, two months, I could rapidly get myself to the thousands. 

But my smugness was quickly wiped away just like when I would play Mario Kart with those that knew the shortcuts. I was engaging with people I didn’t resonate with and most of them didn’t resonate with me. Beyond that, my content wasn’t great and I didn’t resonate with the Twitter platform as a whole (I loved it when I was younger but under new ownership and branding it’s just not the pure platform that it was before). 

Some of the people that I had followed were exactly the people that I described above - those that follow people en-masse and I was getting followed by people doing the exact same thing. 

You can usually quickly find these people on social media in a couple of ways. One, they follow you and have an absolutely massive ratio of who they follow vs who follows them. Think following 50,000 people and having 1,000 followers. They likely have a limited amount of content as well and if they have a lot of content, it’s likely content that you have seen or heard before. The last way to recognize these people is if you engage with any of their content, it will have limited to no engagement despite their follower count. 

I have seen people with 10s of thousands of followers get less than 1% engagement from their audience because their audience doesn’t resonate with them in any way shape or form and followed them out of obligation. 

It’s crazy because you can acquire followers through this method in a matter of days or weeks where some people work their ass off for years to get to 1,000 followers or subscribers. 

It may seem like the person that was able to quickly build an audience is going to be more successful because they are destined for more engagement than the person that took ages to develop their following but in practice, that’s not how it works. 

The person that spent years cultivating their following of 1,000 followers has diehard fans that not only love their content but want to actively engage with them. 

The person with 10s of thousands of fans will have a limited number of people that give their content the time of day. They may have more exposure, but their content is ignored more. 

In our algorithm driven society, the first person is going to get noticed and have their content circulated more. 

If they continue to work as hard as they have to this point or step on the gas even harder, they have the potential for exponential growth where the shortcutter’s growth is likely to be more linear. 

So how have I applied my first hand learnings to strengthen my approach and grow my skills?

First, I dropped Twitter. I don’t resonate with the platform nor the people I was engaging with. If I decide to go back to the platform, it’ll be after I have created my following organically through prolonged effort on other platforms and I will post more valuable content from my experiences so I’m not another echo in that echo-chamber. 

I then pivoted my approach across platforms. Instead of sticking with the content that I was posting on YouTube that centered around product reviews - which I was inconsistent with due to the realization that I was confining my creativity to a box that I couldn’t permanently be contained within - I decided that I would post a larger volume of content to my website and use that content to help me to create YouTube content that adds more value to others. 

Based on those that have grown significantly within that area, I am curating a library of 100 videos before I publicize them. The intention in this is not to avoid posting but to give people a library of content to explore immediately to see if they resonate with me. 

Instead of getting a piece of feedback on one piece of content, it allows me to get a ton of feedback across numerous pieces of content and will enable me to refine my process with viewer feedback after I have already spent time refining my content based on my own critiques. 

I am focusing on a large volume of content as I likely won’t see much success before then anyway so this is a small commitment to my long-term success by focusing on quantity and refinement on my own. 

I want to refine my methods daily prior to getting inundated with feedback so people can understand me before trying to paint me into the person that they want me to be - I simply won’t do this but am happy to ensure that I am communicating effectively. 

While I can’t speak from the perspective of outcomes yet, I believe that if I can focus my efforts in this way, I will be able to create a following that finds value in my content and follows me because I resonate with them and not because I followed them to dupe them into following me back. 

I have also learned the value of the long road as opposed to shortcuts. While shortcuts can provide those nice dopamine hits that I experienced in my follower growth and in Mario Kart, you will ultimately get past your depth and will be unable to sustain what you are doing. 

While you may benefit in the short term, you stand to hurt yourself more in the long run by failing to build the requisite skills and work ethic required along the way. 

While I have focused on gaining a social media following, this is broadly applicable to life. Shortcuts to success stand to rob you of the experiences needed to achieve increasing levels of success - shortcutting your pathway back to where you started or even lower as Kevin Hart aptly summarized. 

In Mario Kart, the shortcuts might give you a temporary lead, but mastering the fundamentals of racing—precise steering, perfect timing on power-ups, knowing when to drift— creates a consistently winning player. Similarly, in building a following, a career, or any meaningful pursuit, it's the mastery you develop along the slow road that sustains you when shortcuts no longer work. The journey itself equips you with the skills that no algorithm change, market shift, or competitor can take away.

What are you working toward right now? What shortcuts tempt you most, and what essential lessons might they be robbing you of? When you imagine the skilled version of yourself five years from now, which path—the shortcut or the long road—actually leads to that person?