Speed Is Now a Commodity. Enter the Perfectionist.

Let me be upfront with you. I am not a perfectionist.

I scraped my 2:1 degree by 0.3%. I have built entire companies on the principle of doing 20% of the work to get 80% of the result. The Pareto principle has been my north star, my comfort blanket, and frankly my excuse for calling things "done" before most people have formed a plan. It has served me well.

But the rules have changed. And I say this with the specific grief of a man who has spent his entire career weaponising shortcuts.

Not long ago, if you could do something faster than the person next to you, you had the advantage.

The ability to quickly read a situation, frame a sharp conclusion, and present a coherent solution in a day rather than a week made you exponentially more valuable. Speed, when pointed in the right direction, compounds. The fast thinkers, the people who could synthesise complexity at pace and articulate it clearly were the people I was always looking for. A whole team of them and you were unstoppable. 

And then AI happened.

Claude, GPT, Gemini. Pick your poison.

Every single one of them will serve up 80% of the work before you have finished your first cup of tea. A strategy document. A competitive analysis. A first draft. A structured argument. A marketing campaign skeleton. Delivered on a silver platter by something that does not sleep, does not have a mortgage, and is not quietly doom-scrolling instead of focusing.

The 80%, the fast work, the rough answer, the serviceable draft is now a commodity. It belongs to everyone. It costs almost nothing. And it means that if "moving fast" is your competitive edge, you are now racing on a track where every other runner has a motorcycle.

Sure, if you sit down in a GCSE exam with just a pen and a prayer, the ability to think fast still matters. But that is not real life. Real life is a keyboard, a browser, and a model that has read more than you ever will.

The 20%.

The last nine yards. The gap between a serviceable answer and a genuinely excellent one. Between a decent piece of work and something that makes the person reading it feel something. That is, arguably, the only true remaining value of humans in an information economy.

The final 20% is the new battlefield, and it is absolutely rammed. So the question becomes: how do you actually win there?

Some people will tell you the answer is taste. Or style. The ineffable creative spark that AI supposedly cannot replicate. The je ne sais quoi that makes certain humans irreplaceable.

And look, I do not entirely disagree. But I have a problem with framing it that way. "Taste" sounds like something you either have or you don’t. It excludes people. It is elitist in a slightly irritating way, and it does not give anyone a practical handle to grab onto. A global workforce trying to reimagine its purpose in an AI world does not benefit from being told to simply "have better taste."

I like to call it something else, something we’re all capable of. Some far more than others. Perfectionism.

Not the paralysing, neurotic, nothing-ever-ships variety. Not the person who rewrites the same email fourteen times and misses the deadline entirely. The productive kind. The kind that is a genuine, learnable discipline. And I am going to argue that every single one of us needs to develop it, starting now.

Not only am I not a perfectionist, I actively have disliked working with perfectionists in the past. They slow things down, fact. When speed is your competitive edge, I saw them as a parachute on your back and you try to run a marathon in record time.

And now I’m saying that’s what we all need to become to stay ahead. Brilliant.

The big question is. What does a valuable perfectionist do? What do they look like and how can we replicate their behaviour?

Set your own standard, not the minimum bar. I think the shift starts here. Instead of asking "does this meet the brief?", try asking "is this actually good?" They sound similar but they are not. AI will always meet the brief. What it probably cannot do, at least not yet, is genuinely care whether the output is excellent. My hunch is that caring, really caring, might be the whole game now.

Notice what others miss. This one feels underrated to me. The people I ended up respecting most in my career were not always the fastest or the smartest. They were the ones who caught the thing everyone missed. The inconsistency in the data. The tone that shifts halfway through. The detail that quietly undermines the whole argument. In a world drowning in volume, I suspect the person who slows down enough to actually look will become increasingly rare, and increasingly valuable.

Iterate without being asked. Most people, myself included for most of my career, submit the first version that clears the bar and move on. What if the habit was to quietly run a second and third pass before anyone sees it? Not because someone asked, but because you have started interrogating your own work from the perspective of the person receiving it. I think that instinct, once developed, is hard to replicate with a prompt.

What does this mean for Marketers?

If you run a marketing team, look around. Has someone always slowed things down to check the data one more time? Do they push back on the headline because it didn't feel right? Let’s appreciate those who care about the last 20% when nobody asks them to.

If you are a marketer yourself, start proving your value through quality. Be the person who catches what the AI missed. Be the one who says "this is fine, but it is not good enough" before the client does. That instinct is going to be an in demand professional skill.

And if you manage people through this shift, be honest with them. Do not pretend the game has not changed. The kindest thing you can do right now is help your team see where the new value sits and give them space to develop it. The worst thing you can do is keep rewarding speed while the market quietly reprices it to zero.

I spent years being productively imperfect, and I am not fully apologising for it. Speed got a lot of things built. But I am under no illusion about what the moment we are in demands.

AI has compressed the value of being fast into near-zero. What it cannot compress, at least not yet, is the human commitment to making something genuinely, stubbornly, unreasonably good.

The perfectionists are no longer the annoying ones holding everything up. They are the ones who will matter most in the next decade.

I am working on becoming one. I suggest you do the same.

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