That’s it. That’s the blog entry. If you want the longer version (with the million-peso mistake and all the lessons), read below.

I loathe shortcuts. I mean, loathe, loathe, loathe them.

Just to be clear, I don’t mean the kind of shortcut that avoids traffic. I mean the kind that wrecks your work.

It wasn’t always like this. When I was younger, I thought I was clever if I could cut corners to save time…only to spend more time fixing mistakes. Every shortcut turned into a long cut. That lesson rewired me: if you want something done right, you do every step. No skipping.

That habit carried into my advertising days. I had copy check rituals. I’d read ads fast, then slow. Forwards…then backwards. “The quick brown fox” became “fox, brown, quick, the.” Sounds obsessive, but it saved me (and the agency) more times than I can count.

It even became a rule for my team. Until one day, one of my best account managers (really sharp, but still learning) skipped the copy check ritual on a full-page broadsheet for a major soft drink brand. The next morning, the paper came out with a stand-in winning promo code still on it.

That mistake could have cost us a million pesos if someone had tried to claim the prize. Thankfully, the placeholder code wasn’t patterned after the real one, and I managed to get the ad reprinted the next day (for free, from media savings). The client appreciated the quick fix. No one lost money. My account manager? She learned a lesson she’ll never forget.

And the same principle still applies today. In automation planning, I don’t let the team just “start building.” Maybe it sounds excessive, but we spend a long, long time (often weeks) just mapping and re-mapping workflows. Step by step. Review. Then refine. Then review again. We double-check whether the SaaS stack will actually do what it’s meant to do. Then we make sure the schema from the very first step connects all the way to the objective at the last step…even if that’s node 150 down the road.

We document obsessively. Notes on where to change things, which part of the automation will be affected, how documentation and training will need to be updated. It feels super heavy at the start…but later, when we start automating, when we’re training people or debugging, it saves enormous time. And no one misses out on the thinking and the learning. Everyone is 100% aligned. No wasted work.

The same goes for sales training. I see people shortcut it all the time. They “perform” during training, pretending they already know how to handle objections. They say the right lines to look sharp…but when they face a real customer, they fall apart. They cheated themselves out of learning. The right way is to fail as much as you can in training. Who care if your answer is wrong? Say what you’d really say. That way you see your mistakes clearly and fix them before it matters.

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Here’s the thing: shortcuts don’t just create mistakes. They prevent you from training your brain to think properly. If you always skip steps, you never learn to see the sequence of steps. You stay a novice. Once you stop shortcutting, your thinking changes. You begin to see the whole process. You can estimate time better. You can explain why something can’t be done in an hour, because you know the real steps. Ironically, refusing shortcuts makes you faster.

And if you’re wondering what I mean by shortcuts, here are the everyday kind:

• In the gym: skipping leg day because it’s hard. You end up strong on top, weak at the base.
• In school: cramming for exams instead of actually learning. You pass the test, then forget everything two weeks later.
• In relationships: saying what the other person wants to hear instead of the truth. Faster and easier in the moment, painful in the long run.

All of these look like time-savers and energy savers. But they’re not. They rob you of the chance to build the muscle, the knowledge, or the honesty that makes you stronger in the long run.

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If I’m being honest…maybe I’m just lazy. That’s why I don’t do shortcuts. Because nothing feels lazier than cleaning up a giant mess later. I’d rather do it right once than deal with the unintended consequences that wreck my future plans.

So take it from me: shortcuts don’t work. They just look fast until the bill comes due. And sometimes that bill is a million pesos.