The vibration of the steel scraper against a 1947 porcelain enamel surface has a specific frequency that you can feel in your molars. It is not a pleasant sound. It is a screech, a protest of frozen time being disturbed by the modern era. Avery D.-S. does not wear ear protection. They say that if you cannot hear the rust crying, you cannot know when to stop. You will go too deep. You will scar the metal. Avery is currently hunched over a sign that once advertised a motor court in rural Ohio, a relic of an era where things were built to survive a nuclear winter or at least a very bad thunderstorm.

The Empty Hallway: Losing the Thread

I stood in my hallway for 7 minutes this morning. I had walked out of the bedroom with a clear purpose, something about a damp towel or perhaps a missing sock, and by the time I reached the lint trap in the laundry room, the thought had evaporated. It was a clean wipe. My brain felt like a hard drive that had been hit with a magnet. This happens more often than I care to admit. I lose the thread. We all lose the thread. We live in a world designed to help us forget the middle part-the struggle, the friction, the 17 hours of prep work required for 7 minutes of glory. We want the result. We want the ‘buy now’ button to be the only thing we ever have to touch.

This obsession with the ‘frictionless’ is the core frustration of our current existence. If it were easy, it would be a sticker on a piece of plastic.

The Optimization Trap

We have been sold a lie that says the faster we get to the end, the better the experience is. But if you talk to Avery D.-S. while they are meticulously picking out 47 years of bird droppings and grit from a neon transformer housing, they will tell you that the friction is the point. The difficulty is the moat. If it were easy, it would be a sticker on a piece of plastic. It would be disposable. It would be 77 percent less meaningful because it cost nothing in the currency of human patience.

We believe that if we can automate the soul out of a process, we have somehow won. We look at a business and we see a series of bottlenecks that need to be cleared. But what if the bottleneck is where the art happens? What if the bottleneck is the only part of the business that the customer actually cares about? We spend 237 hours trying to save 7 minutes, and in the process, we lose the ‘why’ behind the ‘what.’ We become the person standing in the hallway, forgetting why we entered the room in the first place because we were so focused on the efficiency of our gait.

The Value of Inefficiency

I have made the mistake of trying to scale things that were never meant to be scaled. I once tried to automate my responses to people who were reaching out for genuine advice. I set up 7 different templates. I thought I was being clever. I thought I was being ‘productive.’ What I was actually doing was telling 107 people that they weren’t worth my actual time. I was providing a frictionless experience that had zero value. It took me a long time to realize that the most important things I do are the things that don’t scale at all. They are the messy, manual, inefficient conversations that leave me exhausted but leave the other person feeling seen.

In the world of Avery D.-S., there is no such thing as a template. Every sign is a different disaster. One has been submerged in a flooded basement for 27 years; another has been used as target practice by bored teenagers with a .22 caliber rifle. To restore them, Avery has to engage with the specific damage of each piece. You cannot automate the removal of a bullet hole from a vintage Coca-Cola sign without losing the history of the impact. You have to work around it. You have to respect the trauma of the object.

“You have to respect the trauma of the object. You can’t automate the removal of a bullet hole without losing the history of the impact.”

– Avery D.-S. (Restoration Expert)

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The Contrarian Angle

There is a contrarian angle here that most ‘hustle’ influencers would hate: inefficiency is your only real competitive advantage. In a world where AI can generate 1007 blog posts in the time it takes you to brew a pot of coffee, the only thing that will ever hold value is the thing that an AI cannot do-which is to suffer for the work. The AI doesn’t feel the vibration in its molars. The AI doesn’t get lead paint under its fingernails. The AI doesn’t forget why it walked into the room. It is perfectly efficient, and therefore, it is perfectly boring.

The Hidden Cost of Transit

We see this in the way we handle our physical world too. We want the thing we ordered to arrive before we even realized we wanted it. Yet, there is a limit to how much we can hide the machinery. When a restored sign, weighing 497 pounds and containing fragile neon tubing that could shatter if someone sneezes too loudly, needs to get from the workshop to a gallery in New York, the friction returns. You can’t just wish it there. You need a system that understands the weight of the work. For many businesses trying to balance that high-touch craft with the need to actually survive in the marketplace, finding a partner to handle the physical reality of the world becomes essential. Many creators find themselves leaning on

Fulfillment Hub USA to manage the transition from the messy reality of the studio to the door of the customer, ensuring that the soul of the work survives the journey.

Because that is the hidden cost of efficiency: the damage done during the transit. When we optimize for speed, we usually sacrifice safety, or quality, or the basic human connection. We wrap things in bubble wrap and hope for the best, but the soul of the thing often gets bruised. I remember a specific instance where I tried to rush a project for a client. I cut out the 7 layers of review. I skipped the 17-minute phone call where we usually just talk about our dogs. I delivered the project 27 hours early. The client was happy with the speed, but the relationship felt thinner afterward. We had removed the ‘wasteful’ parts of the interaction, only to realize that the waste was the fertilizer for the trust we were building.

The Heartbeat of the Imperfect

Avery D.-S. once told me about a sign they found in a barn. It was a simple ‘Open’ sign, but the glass had been hand-blown by someone who clearly had a shaky hand. The light it produced wasn’t a clean, steady glow; it flickered with a rhythmic pulse that felt almost like a heartbeat. A modern LED sign would be 97 percent more efficient. It would last 77 times longer. It would cost $7. But no one would ever stand in front of an LED sign for 17 minutes just to watch it breathe. We are drawn to the flaws. We are drawn to the evidence of the struggle.

The Beauty in the Pits

I am still trying to remember why I went into that room this morning. Maybe I just wanted to see if the light was hitting the floor the same way it did yesterday. There is a certain beauty in the aimless wandering of the mind, the kind of inefficiency that allows for a new thought to take root. If my brain were perfectly optimized, I would never have these moments of confusion. We need the gaps. We need the 7-second pauses in conversation where neither person knows what to say, because that is the space where the truth usually leaks out.

Avery is finishing the scrape now. The 1947 sign is starting to show its original face. It is not perfect. There are pits in the metal and a slight discoloration where the heat of the neon once scorched the paint. Avery runs a finger over the blemish and smiles. They aren’t going to fix that part. They say it gives the sign character. I think what they mean is that it gives the sign a memory. And in a world that is moving so fast that we can’t even remember why we walked into the kitchen, a memory is the most valuable thing you can possibly build. We should all be so lucky to have a few scars that prove we were actually there, doing the work, refusing to be optimized into oblivion.