The Skip Button Is a Trap

The real danger isn’t AI, it’s our impulse to skip the work

In the 2006 movie Click, Adam Sandler gets a remote that controls reality: pause, rewind, fast-forward. At first, he skips only the boring stuff. Traffic. Arguments. Late nights. But the remote starts auto-skipping anything uncomfortable.

The years blur. His career climbs. His family vanishes. By the time he notices what he traded away, he can’t rewind. Like any time-traveling-dad movie, the comedy fades into tears as you receive a gut punch about what really matters.

In the end, the time-skipping protagonist learns the value of appreciating every day with his family and friends. He sees those seemingly mundane moments are worth choosing over any shortcut to wealth and convenience.

Sandler and director Frank Coraci weren’t alluding to AI, but the parallel is obvious now. Technology keeps making it easier to skip friction in our lives. Not just rote tasks, but actual thinking, patience, learning curves. Our keyboards have gained unfathomable power to conjure something that looks finished. We’re all figuring out responsible use in slow motion.

I’ve always been prone to that temptation to skip ahead.

The Idea-Guy Trap

If you’re a bit like me, exciting ideas come easy, but you have low tolerance for the grind required to make something valuable.

Us “idea people” are replaying that discovery of an exciting video game from our childhood… the one we gave up and entered cheat codes to level up. Or the math homework we “automated” with our calculator because we wanted the A without memorizing the formula. Or the dozen domain names we bought that fit that business idea perfectly… until the next morning or first real human conversation exposed the flaws.

The danger isn’t that idea people don’t start things. We start too much. Or we think about starting too much. The danger is we never stay long enough to let difficulty work on us.

Pivot ≠ Progress

In basketball, if you haven’t dribbled yet, you can pivot all you want as long as one foot stays planted. You can swivel 360 degrees, surveying every possible angle. It feels active, but it’s not. The only way to advance is to move the ball is to let go and risk losing it. The best basketball teams move the ball a lot. They don’t pivot and unpivot forever.

To score, the ball has to move. You have to take shots. You have to miss some.

I happen to be in that mode now, one foot planted, and one foot exploring different paths, figuring out which lane to attack in the coming year.

Preaching to myself here, I know that moving more on my ideas will mean I get more shots on goal, and a greater chance that something finds the bottom of the net.

Small Losses, Real Attempts

My first startup cost eight years, millions raised, and a pile of emotional and relational debt. I learned a lot. I also paid a lot. And I brought investors along with me who never saw a return for betting on us. That made it twice as painful to fail.

The second time, I tried something on the side (nights and weekends). Low burn. We built, tested, shut it down. Losses: under $3,000. No scorched earth.

That’s a healthier pattern: bounded downside, real attempts.

I know the cost of the “all in” road now. I know what it’s like to resent the very work I once chose freely, even when it was my idea, my responsibility, my thing. I know the nights of anxious, restless sleep when the plan is failing and the path is unclear. The part where you’ve already paid so much, but the mountain still hasn’t moved. Where quitting feels wrong, but staying feels unbearable.

I also know the stagnation of coming up with a dozen ideas, and committing to none of them.

The crazy thing is, the skip buttons can show up on either end of this spectrum.

Not just AI.
Video games.
Porn.
Social media.
Endless research.
Anything that simulates motion and fuels our success-starved brain while we remain in place, fixing nothing.

The Real Point

I think what I’m really after is an adventure worth the trials. Not riskless, not easy, just hopeful and deeply worth it. Not “become a unicorn” or “make me rich” or “improve my reputation” or any other self-centered goal, but a worthwhile outcome for the world.

A life that doesn’t need skipping.