The Case for Inefficiency

Read time: 4 minutes

Welcome to The Ascend Archives, a 2x/month newsletter where I share a story about a transformation, revelation, or change in thinking that has improved an aspect of my life.

Yesterday at 5:30, I was still sitting at a desk in my coworking office.

That alone was unusual.

Most days, I’m out by 4:30 or 5. But my girlfriend had plans, no clients were asking for anything, and for the first time in a while I had nowhere to be.

So I decided to dive back into a project that has been dragging on for months.

It’s a deep dive profile of an experienced climate tech venture capitalist. It’s a passion project that I’m doing for free to get better at long-form writing, storytelling, and to see if I actually enjoy the process of researching someone’s life and piecing together a narrative.

When I first sat down to start it a few weeks ago, my mind immediately went to:

How can I do this as efficiently as possible?

So I pulled up Claude.

I started prompting it to help with research. When I wasn’t getting anywhere, I asked which AI tool would be best—NotebookLM, Perplexity, Gemini? When those couldn’t get past Substack paywalls or pull podcast transcripts, I started doing the research myself on Google.

I started to skim some of the articles he wrote, but got overwhelmed by the volume. I started listening to his podcasts while I was on runs or in the car, but found myself multitasking.

Eventually, I decided to manually copy all of the essays and podcast transcripts into a Google Doc and upload it back into Claude to synthesize for me.

Then I ran into formatting issues.

Then context limits.

Then more workarounds.

10+ hours later, spread across a few weeks, I finally got everything organized and asked Claude to review all the material, summarize it, and pull out key insights based on what I was trying to accomplish.

And when I read what it gave me…

Nothing landed.

It wasn’t pulling anything interesting. And even if it had, I didn’t really understand any of it because I hadn’t read the underlying material myself. The “insights” were meaningless without the context.

Two weeks of trying to be efficient… and I only had a surface-level idea of who this guy was and what he believed in.

I remember sitting there thinking:

How am I supposed to write something thoughtful, interesting, and different from everything else out there… if I don’t actually understand him?

Short answer: I wasn’t.

What frustrated me even more was when I realized I was avoiding the entire reason I started this project in the first place.

I didn’t take this on to finish a piece as quickly as possible.

I took it on because I wanted to:

• learn from someone who is world class at what he does

• see if I enjoy the process of research and writing

• improve my taste, my thinking, and my storytelling

And instead, I was trying to get AI to do all of that for me.

I was so focused on the outcome, finishing the piece, that I completely ignored the process.

But something finally clicked yesterday when I read a piece of writing from a friend who mentioned his life motto:

“How to Live a Responsibly Inefficient Life.”

It hit me that I had been doing the exact opposite.

For the past six months, I’ve been trying to optimize everything.

I hired a business coach to accelerate my learning curve.
I joined a coworking space to remove decision fatigue.
I plan my workouts.
I meal prep my food.
I am using AI as much as possible.

Like all things in life, these “optimizations” are good in moderation. But somewhere along the way, I lost sight that some of the most valuable parts of life are inherently inefficient.

And writing—especially this kind of writing—is one of them.

There is no efficient way to study 15 years of someone’s career.

No tool that can replace listening to 10–15 hours of podcast interviews just to find one story worth including.

No shortcut that replaces reading dozens of articles to start seeing patterns in how someone thinks.

That is the work.

That is the point.

And so when I was sitting there in my desk last night, after weeks of trying to optimize my way through this…

I finally said screw it.

I walked over to the printer and printed out a 52 sheets of paper double-sided with all of his newsletters.

I grabbed a highlighter, sat back down, and started reading.

No system. No prompts. No plan. 

And almost immediately, everything slowed down.

I wasn’t skimming anymore. I was actually digesting what I was reading. Rereading paragraphs. Trying to understand how he thinks, not just what he says.

I started connecting dots between something he wrote five years ago and something he said on a podcast. 

One hour of that felt better (and some might argue was more productive) than the previous ten.

The sad part was realizing I’d been outsourcing the very things that would make this piece unique: my taste and my thinking.

I was trying to shortcut my way to having taste.

But that doesn’t work.

You only develop taste by doing the work yourself. By reading things that aren’t interesting. By sitting with ideas longer than you want to. By slowly figuring out what matters and what doesn’t.

You only develop taste by doing the work yourself. By reading things that aren’t interesting. By sitting with ideas longer than you want to. By slowly figuring out what matters and what doesn’t.

That process is inefficient. But that's also the whole point.

I’m excited to share more soon on the profile I’m writing and what I’m learning from it!

Thank you for reading! As always please reply and let me know what resonated, what didn’t, or what you question. I love chatting about this stuff!

Cheers,

Andrew