About this article:
Still Thinking is a personal reflection on what marketing leaders have chosen to keep doing themselves in an AI-everything world. The habits, rituals, and creative practices they are deliberately protecting.
I wake up at 5 a.m. on the dot. I throw on my matching workout set and my running shoes, and I'm out the door, going for a run while the sun rises. I come back, do my cold plunge, and proceed to write a thousand words. Just pen and paper, the glowing embers of the morning sun, and me. —No, I don't do this. I don't think most people do this. I don't think any of the people who say they do this actually do it either.
My mornings are usually more like this: I wake up because a toddler is yelling. I realize I overslept. I throw on yesterday’s clothes because it’s too hard to pick something new out of my closet. I get my kids fed (i.e. I rip a bagel in half and throw the pieces at them). We get out the door within about 25 minutes. Then I come back to my home office, and my actual day starts.
And that day does not begin with a beautifully protected block of deep thought. It begins with coffee. A lot of coffee. And a lot of reacting: checking email, triaging email, scrolling headlines, looking at feeds, trying to remember what I missed yesterday and which deadlines are tapping their shoes at me before I’ve even fully become a person. I’m writing, reading, synthesizing, interpreting metrics, and making decisions all day long. I am, in other words, exactly the kind of person who should be susceptible to the promise of AI making things easier. And (shudder) I am.
When a friend sends me a 5,000-word research report I genuinely want to read, my brain is already a little fried. It’s very tempting to drop the link into ChatGPT and say: can you read this for me and tell me what I need to know?
I’ll admit, sometimes I do a little of that. If something is highly technical and I need a quick explainer, sure. If I need help understanding a concept, clarifying a term, or getting my bearings before I dive in, that’s useful. I’m not interested in pretending otherwise. I use these tools. Happily. But as I type this, I realize that there is a line I don’t ever want to cross.
It does not matter how well ChatGPT appears to summarize something; I still end up going back to the actual thing. Because I want to. I still want to read the report. I still want to see how the argument is made. I still want to notice what was emphasized, what was glossed over, what surprises me, or what reaffirms something I’ve long suspected. I still want the firsthand encounter with the material, even if it takes longer and even if it would be more “efficient” to settle for the summary. It’s not because I’m trying to be precious, or because I think everything good has to be hard. It’s because there’s a difference between processing information and building knowledge. And there is definitely a difference between borrowing someone else’s summary and developing your own judgment.
That last one matters to me most.
A lot of what I do for work depends on taste and interpretation. I have to decide what is interesting, what is true, what is overhyped, what is being measured poorly, what is being overstated, what actually matters. That kind of judgment does not come from hovering near ideas. It comes from putting in the reps.
You have to read things. You have to wrestle with them a little. You have to get bored and read that line two more times to get interested again. You have to notice the patterns yourself, catch contradictions, and sometimes realize you were wrong.
AI can help me move faster. It can help me organize a mess, translate jargon, and pressure-test a hypothesis I’m forming. But it cannot build my understanding for me. It cannot form my point of view. It cannot do the slow, cumulative work of helping me know something well enough that it becomes part of how I see. That’s what I’m choosing to keep doing myself in an AI-everything world.
So no, my mornings do not look like a beautifully lit ritual of self-optimization. There are no ice baths, and years of typing has it so writing anything longer than a 20-word note makes my hand cramp up. My mornings are sloppy, rushed, and I’m cramming so much into my day I’m almost always late on my next deadline. But somewhere in there, I still read the actual thing. I still make myself learn it. I still put in the reps.
Because it’s not enough to not outsource your thinking, you can’t outsource your learning, either.