Staying Sharp: The Fear That AI Would Make Me Soft
When I first started setting up AI assistants to help run my day, I had a quiet worry in the back of my head: Is this going to make me less sharp?
We have all seen what happens when you hand a mental muscle over to a tool. Once you rely on turn-by-turn GPS for every drive across town, your internal map starts to fade. Once your phone remembers every number, you stop holding numbers in your head. After decades of building and operating a business, where staying on top of a hundred moving parts was just how you stayed alive, I worried that delegating the reading, drafting, and admin legwork to AI would dull the edge. If something else is doing the digging, do you slowly stop thinking for yourself?
For the first little while, I watched for signs of that slide. I paid attention to whether I was getting lazier with details, or skimming past decisions I used to chew on.
What I noticed instead surprised me, and sitting at my desk this morning, it hit me that the exact opposite is happening. I do not feel less sharp. I feel sharper than I have in years.
The biggest reason is what used to get in the way of real thinking. Most of the things we procrastinate on are not hard judgment calls. They are the high-friction chores wrapped around those calls: tracking down a form, cross-checking three spreadsheets, digging up an old thread, or staring at a blank page before writing a note you have been putting off. When you are doing all of that by hand, your energy leaks out in the setup. You put things off not because you do not know what to decide, but because you do not feel like doing forty minutes of clerical work to get to the decision.
When that friction drops away, you engage earlier and more often. Instead of letting a nagging question sit on a list for three weeks, I pull on the thread right away. In a single morning I can pressure-test an insurance change, weigh a governance course, talk to a friend who has done it, and act on the answer while the context is still fresh in my head.
The second piece is that having a capable partner on the other side of the screen keeps your mind in motion. Thinking alone in your own head has a way of stalling out or looping on the same two assumptions. Having an assistant that keeps getting the ball back—with the real numbers, the counterarguments, and the next question ready—forces you to stay engaged. Even on this site, the goal is not a breathless real-time feed of every little move, just a lightweight running tally of the latest projects and what I am learning along the way.
A tool only makes you soft if you use it to stop paying attention. If you use it to clear the brush so you can engage with more of the things that actually matter, it does not dull your mind at all. It gives you someone to rally with.