A woman who approached Picasso in a restaurant, asked him to scribble something on a napkin, and said she would be happy to pay whatever he felt it was worth. Picasso complied and then said, "That will be $10,000."
"But you did that in thirty seconds," the astonished woman replied.
"No," Picasso said. "It has taken me forty years to do that."
The Invisible Foundation
I think about this story whenever I watch someone excel at their craft. The moment of creation (the sketch, the solution, the perfect line of code) appears almost magical. But that magic is built on an invisible foundation of years, sometimes decades, of deliberate practice, failure, and refinement.
We live in an age of highlights and final products. Social media shows us the polished result, not the messy process. We see the YouTuber effortlessly switching between mediums, the entrepreneur launching their "overnight" success, the artist producing work that seems to flow from their fingertips. What we don't see is the compound effect of thousands of hours that made that apparent ease possible.
The Paradox of Mastery
Here's the beautiful paradox: getting good is slow, but being good is fast.
When I first started building web applications, a simple contact form was a maze of complexity. Every step required research: evaluating approaches, trying them, getting frustrated, and spending hours on a constant stream of decisions. I didn't even know if they were the right ones. Now the same task would still take a few hours, but I know the parts, I can evaluate solutions faster, and I'm more confident in my implementation. The difference is experience, pattern recognition, intuition, and the confidence that comes from having solved similar problems hundreds of times before.
Today, I can take an idea from concept to working prototype in a matter of hours, days or weeks. I can ideate, plan, design, and build without being blindsided by unexpected complexity. And for the parts I don't know I'm better at estimating how long it will take to figure out. But what you don't see are the hundreds of days and nights I spent struggling, questioning my abilities, wondering if I should have chosen a different path entirely.
The transformation wasn't gradual. It was more like crossing a threshold. One day, the cognitive load that once consumed all my mental bandwidth became background noise. My brain was finally free to focus on the creative and strategic aspects instead of wrestling with the fundamentals.
I can't pinpoint exactly when that shift happened. It was seamless, arriving sometime after landing my first professional development job.
The 80/20 of Expertise
This principle extends far beyond specific skills. In almost every field, a small percentage of practitioners produce the majority of the outstanding work. It's not because they're necessarily more talented, but because they've crossed that threshold where execution becomes effortless, freeing them to focus on innovation and quality.
Take Marco, the YouTube creator who produces outstanding art across all sorts of mediums. Watch him work and you'll see someone who moves between disciplines (woodworking, leather work, painting, car detailing, cobbling) with a fluidity that seems impossible. But each of those skills represents years of foundation-building that happened off-camera: hundreds of hours of practice, experimentation, and mastery that allows him to create with such ease and confidence.
(I've never met Marco. Perhaps he just does this without practice, but I doubt it.)
Another favorite is watching improv musicians like Ted Ladesco, The Doo, and Harry Mack play complicated, intricate, original renditions of songs on the spot. They blend genres and themes into music that sounds produced and planned. For them, creation is almost instantaneous. But that speed comes from years of practice, improvisation, and deep mastery of their craft.
The same pattern emerges everywhere:
- In software, a handful of developers contribute to most major open-source projects
- In writing, prolific authors seem to publish effortlessly while others struggle with a single book
- In business, serial entrepreneurs launch ventures with a speed that baffles first-timers
It's not that these people work faster; it's that they've already put in the hours.
The Confidence Multiplier
Skills create confidence, and confidence creates speed. When you truly know your craft, you spend less time second-guessing decisions and more time executing them. You waste fewer cycles changing direction because you can see further down the path. Not because you can see the future, but because you've already been down a very similar path before.
This confidence manifests in subtle but powerful ways:
- Fewer false starts: you can spot dead ends earlier
- Better decisions: you've learned from past mistakes
- Faster iteration: you're not afraid to experiment
- Cleaner execution: the fundamentals are automatic
- Actual progress: you're not paralyzed by indecision
Watch a master craftsperson work, whether a chef, a programmer, or a carpenter, and you'll notice an economy of motion that comes from deep familiarity with their tools and materials. They're not thinking about how to do something; they're thinking about what to create.
The Long Game Advantage
Here's what might be the most important insight: the people producing great work quickly didn't choose the fast path. They chose the long one.
While others searched for shortcuts, optimizations, and life hacks, masters embraced the slow, deliberate process of building foundational skills. They chose repetition over novelty, depth over breadth, mastery over immediate gratification.
This creates a beautiful irony. The person who seems to work the fastest today is probably the one who moved the slowest yesterday. They took time to understand principles instead of memorizing steps. They chose to fail small and often rather than avoid failure altogether.
The Quality Gradient
There's another layer to this: the difference between levels of quality often requires exponentially more effort, but exponentially less time to execute once you have the skill.
The difference between mediocre and good might be a few hours of additional effort. But the difference between good and great can require weeks or months of refinement. However, once you've internalized what "great" looks like, producing it becomes your new baseline.
It's like a musician who has mastered their instrument. Playing a simple melody is effortless, but they can also attempt complex pieces that would be impossible for a beginner. The foundation enables both speed and ambition.
Reframing the Journey
The next time you see someone producing exceptional work with apparent ease, resist the urge to feel discouraged. Instead, try to appreciate the years of invisible labor that made that moment possible. They're not superhuman; they're simply further along on a path that you can walk too.
Remember that while they were building those skills, they probably weren't as good as you at the things you've been practicing. Time is the ultimate equalizer, but only if we use it intentionally.
The choice isn't between fast and slow, or between quality and speed. The choice is between building a foundation that enables both, or staying trapped in the illusion that shortcuts exist.
Starting Your Foundation
The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The second-best time is now.
Pick one skill that matters to you. Commit to the long game. Accept that progress will feel slow at first, that you'll question whether you're improving, that others will seem to have natural advantages you lack.
But also know that somewhere in the future, there's a version of you that makes the difficult look effortless. That version exists only on the other side of deliberate practice, patience, and the willingness to embrace being a beginner.
Good takes time. But once you're good, good is fast. And that's a trade worth making.