Shortcut

The heart of Pollack's investigation is a distinction he keeps circling: some shortcuts genuinely eliminate unnecessary work, while others simply hide the cost and move it somewhere you can't see. The good shortcut removes steps that were never needed. The bad shortcut removes steps that were doing something important, and the bill arrives later, usually with interest. From the outside, in the moment of choosing, the two feel exactly the same. That, he suggests, is the whole trap.

He is fond of examples where the shortcut works beautifully. A surgeon who has performed a procedure a thousand times moves faster than a novice, not because she is cutting corners but because experience has compressed the decision into something close to instinct. Expertise, in Pollack's telling, is a bank of well-earned shortcuts. The pilot who lands in a crosswind, the chess master who sees the strong move at a glance — they aren't skipping the thinking, they've internalized it so thoroughly that it happens without the slow deliberation a beginner would need.

Here the book takes its most original turn. Pollack, a working speechwriter, argues that the most powerful shortcuts we take are not physical at all — they are the mental ones, and chief among them is analogy. When we say a new thing is like some familiar thing, we skip the enormous labor of understanding it from scratch. We borrow a ready-made frame. Analogy is the shortcut that lets a listener grasp in seconds an idea that took the speaker years to reach, and Pollack thinks it may be the most underrated force in human persuasion and decision-making.

He shows how this works in the rooms where decisions get made. A policy debate is very often a fight over which analogy wins. Is this conflict another Vietnam, a quagmire to avoid, or another Munich, an aggressor who must be stopped before he grows? Whichever comparison sticks tends to determine the choice, because the analogy smuggles a conclusion inside it. The person who controls the metaphor controls the argument, and usually the audience never notices a shortcut has been taken at all. That, from a speechwriter, is a confession as much as an observation.

Stepping back, what Pollack has really written is a book about a tool that is inseparable from a trap. He resists the two easy conclusions a reader might expect. He does not scold us for taking shortcuts, in the manner of the self-help book that preaches slow, honest, painstaking effort as the only virtue. Nor does he celebrate shortcuts as pure cleverness, in the manner of the productivity culture that sells life hacks by the dozen. His position is harder and more honest: the shortcut is neither vice nor virtue. It is the mechanism by which almost everything human gets done, and by which a great deal gets ruined.

The reason we can't simply choose better, he suggests, is that the shortcut hides its own nature. Every genuine advance and every disastrous corner-cut presents itself the same way — as an obviously smart way to save time, money, or effort. The wheel and the Ponzi scheme both look, at the moment of adoption, like a good idea. This is why intelligence and even expertise offer only partial protection. Smart people don't take fewer shortcuts; they take more, faster, and their confidence can make the failures larger when they come.

Pollack closes where he began, with the isthmus. The Americans who finished the canal did not succeed because they were less ambitious than de Lesseps. They succeeded because they finally treated the disease and the terrain as the real work rather than as inconveniences to be rushed past. They still built a shortcut — one of the greatest ever made — but only after they stopped pretending it could be free. The corner that couldn't be cut had to be gone around.