Hey Reader,

Have you noticed people seem to be outsourcing their thinking more lately?

Clear writing used to be a good indicator of clear thinking.

To produce clear writing, you had to go through an iterative process that involved reflection and refinement.

Amazon famously required six-page memos before every meeting. They banned slide decks because they masked poorly thought-through ideas.

The point of the memo was never the words on the page, but instead that rounds of thinking and iteration that went behind it.

But now, we have a problem.

You can produce what looks like polished writing, that’s well articulated, without any of that process actually happening. Receiving a six-page memo means nothing.

When someone gets a business assignment, they dictate their thoughts for two minutes, upload some docs for context, and the AI spits out a full strategy. After skimming it to make sure it looks decent, they share it with the team. Everything that used to happen between the problem and the final output gets skipped.

So long as they have a decent prompt that filters out AI slop writing, you never know if you are reading many hours of careful thought and research or something that got the quick "this sounds smart" before pressing publish.

I fear we’re losing the ability to think. Maybe even the desire.

AI is very useful, people are just using it at the wrong stage.

In art school when we were working on compositions, the instructors would always make us do thumbnailing. This is where you divide a page into small squares and sketch as many different concepts as you can before picking one. You can use AI the same way—for brainstorming. Tell it to give you five distinct strategies for a problem you're facing and apply your own judgment as to which one is worth developing.

The leadership coaching program Reboot does something similar. At one of their offsites, they gave us a lump of clay to sculpt and had us walk to each cardinal point around it, stopping to answer different questions from each position. The rule was you couldn't spin the object—you had to physically move. That detail made all the difference to force a true perspective shift rather than a simulated one.

You can do the same thing when thinking through your idea—have you looked at it from the perspective of a competitor, a team mate, or a mentor?

This is part of the reason I have a board of advisors for Kit. I can ask them for advice, but I can also ask myself, "What would Ryan (or Kieran, etc) say about this problem?"

It's also why I love studying biographies. With enough context, you can give a decent answer to "How would Elon Musk or Oprah overcome this obstacle?"

We used to do this kind of thinking organically, over weeks of conversations and walks. Now you have to actively choose to do it. Because it’s so easy not to when you can quickly spin up something that makes it look like you put real thought into it.

With the last strategy doc I put out for Kit, I had been talking through the ideas for weeks before I wrote anything down. By the time I actually sat down to write, the argument had already taken shape through those conversations.

The danger with AI is you can spend an hour to produce what looks like something that took a month to do but is actually of materially worse quality.

I'm not saying to avoid AI writing—it's a powerful tool—but don't outsource your thinking. Instead use AI to generate a variety of ideas, to edit your writing, and to challenge your thinking.

Have you ever asked AI to point out all the holes and logical fallacies in your writing? It's happy to be brutally honest.

So how do you actually determine whether someone has put in real thought on an idea they’re presenting? Detailed writing isn't a clear indicator anymore.

Where I’m landing is when someone has really worked through an idea, you can tell in conversation. If you push them on a point, or ask a thoughtful question, they can answer it because they’ve thought it through. That only comes from spending some time with an idea.

What do you think—are you worried about losing the habit of working through hard things yourself?

Hit reply, I'd love to hear where you're landing on this.

​

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How To Actually Break Free From Your Limiting Beliefs

Nir Eyal spent six years researching what separates people who persist from people who quit. The result is Beyond Belief, his new New York Times bestseller.

Early in our conversation, he mentioned he doesn't believe in jet lag, which was pretty surprising to me. And that shaped everything that followed.

We cover the science of open-label placebos, the formula for burnout, and why Nir stopped chasing happiness. You'll learn how to identify the limiting beliefs that are holding you back.

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MCP, or Model Context Protocol, let's you connect AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini to software like Kit. So instead of copy/pasting things back and forth, you can just have your AI do things for you in Kit automatically.

Like build a welcome sequence, analyzing unsubscribers by source, or building a live launch dashboard that updates every morning. There are a lot more ideas in the article.

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—Nathan

P.S.

I had a quick trip to LA this last week for The Hollywood Creator Summit, and it's so fun to be able to fly my own plane down from Boise (putting that instrument rating to good use!).

I recorded three really great podcast episodes while I was there with Jasmine Starr, Chris Do, and Tyler Chou. Coming soon to a podcast feed near you!