Why I Was Counting the Wrong Hours

Something was bugging me for a long time. Why was I defensive, so conservative, when it came to AI tools?
The answer is TIME.
Did I get your attention? :) Let me explain.

The ledger

Every person thinks he is unique. Every programmer thinks he writes the best code and that nobody else could do it better. Every engineer thinks his solution to the problem is the most advanced one. Every designer thinks his view of beauty is the best one.

All of that has one name. It is called confidence and it is not free - you pay for it in hours:

• 10 years of full-time work - around 20,000 hours.
• The nights that were not required to work, but you spent them working anyway - 4 hours x 400 occasions = 1,600 hours.
• The weekends when your friends went to the party and you did the extra homework - 4 hours x 50 = 200 hours.
• And somewhere inside all of that, a few hundred decisions that turned out to be the right ones. Those you cannot measure in hours, but you remember every single one of them.

Call it 22,000 hours. That is what your confidence is actually made of. Not talent. Hours.

The NO

Then a NEW THING arrives. The first thought that crosses your mind is not "look what I can build with this." BUT were those 22,000 hours for nothing? Are they just erased?

That thought is scary and it makes you hold your ground. It makes you say NO. I was like that  for a few months - I was putting the brakes on myself, intentionally.

The jump

That state of mind can hold you for a while. Then, at some point, you get your sh.t in order and find out that you cannot do it halfway. Not a little bit, just to try it. You have to jump into the ocean of AI and start swimming.

Oh, miracle - it wasn't so bad. First comes the obsession with how many things you can suddenly do at once. Then, one morning, something better happens: your imagination opens. You start seeing the things you could build - the ones that have been sitting in your head for years, the ones you never started because you knew exactly how much TIME they would cost.

TIME again. Except now you are holding a tool that bends it.

The new arithmetic

There is a side effect I did not expect. If you organise your MIND well enough, explain to the tool what you actually want, then you press the button and the miracle happens!  Maybe you have to wait for 10 minutes or  in 20 hours, it doesn't matter, because that time window now belongs to you: for another task, be with your family , read a book to refresh your head, cook something, take a nap. You see my point — the possibilities are endless.

That was the revelation that turned me into an advocate for the AI madness. In a good sense.

So now, when I meet someone who is still counting his hours the "NO way", I do not start explaining the tool to him. No features, no prompts, nothing technical. I only talk about time.

The "NO way" counts the hours you gave to the work. It is a number you defend.

The "YES way" counts the hours the work gives back to you. That is not a number you defend - it is a number you spend, on whatever you decide is worth it.

That is the whole argument. Not what the tool can do, but what it gives back to you. So start counting the YES way.

How many hours do you have? :)