Stop Outsourcing Your Thinking
I caught myself mid-conversation with a client the other day realizing the point I was making wasn't even mine. I'd read it in some strategy piece, absorbed it, and repeated it like I'd come up with it. When your entire job is original thinking applied to hard problems, that should concern you.
It concerned me. Because once I noticed it, I couldn't stop noticing it. I kept losing track of where my own thinking ended and someone else's framework began.
Original thinking is a skill, not a trait. It works like any other muscle. I'd let mine go soft.
For a long time I had the wrong model. I thought original thought meant inventing ideas from nothing. It doesn't.
Original thinking is synthesis. I take in data — arguments, market shifts, deployment failures, client problems — run it through my own experience, and something new comes out. But only if I actually do the work of processing it. Most of the time I wasn't. I was just passing things through.
I see this in the work I do every day. At OperateIQ, when we're deep in a manufacturing transformation, the clients who win aren't the ones with the best consultants or the fanciest playbook. They're the ones whose leadership has a real point of view on how their operation should run — not one borrowed from a McKinsey deck. At Functions AI, where we deploy autonomous agents into enterprise workflows, it's the same thing. The teams that get value from AI are the ones who thought hard about what their processes actually need before we showed up — not the ones who just want "what everyone else is doing."
My problem wasn't intelligence. It was friction — or the lack of it. I was scrolling, absorbing, agreeing, sharing. No resistance anywhere. And I was building companies that help others think more clearly about their operations. Hard to ignore that contradiction.
Engineering Friction
Capture the raw reaction. After I read or watch something now, I stop. I don't check the comments. I don't look for the smart take. I write down what I noticed, where the logic broke, and what I actually think — before anyone else's interpretation gets in.
This is the same principle I apply in client work. Before we bring in frameworks or benchmarks, what does the operator on the floor actually see? What does the engineer closest to the system actually believe? That unfiltered signal is almost always more valuable than the polished one.
Sit with the half-formed thought. My first reaction to most things is incomplete. That used to bother me. Now I treat it as the starting point. A fully formed opinion that arrives too quickly usually means I'm borrowing, not thinking. The discomfort of not knowing what I think yet is where the real work happens.
I've shipped enough V1s across multiple products to know this applies to building too. The first version of everything I've launched was rough. But it was mine, and that made it possible to iterate into something real.
Separate persuasion from substance. When I find myself agreeing with someone, I pause. Am I agreeing because the argument is sound, or because the person is impressive? Would I buy this if it came from someone I'd never heard of, presented badly? The only way to know is to have thought about it before they started talking.
This matters more than ever in enterprise AI. Everyone's repeating the same narratives about what autonomous agents can do. I deploy these systems for a living. Half of what gets applause online doesn't survive contact with a real integration. The only thing that keeps me honest is a point of view built from actual deployments, not demos.
Own it. If a thought is mine, I stand behind it — even when it's unpopular or turns out to be wrong. Hiding behind industry consensus is comfortable but it's empty. People trust you more when you say what you actually believe.
Slow down the inputs. I've been reading less, but deeper. One complex system I actually wrestle with teaches me more than twenty articles I skimmed. I write in the margins. I notice where the theory breaks against my own experience. I form my take before I go looking for anyone else's.
This is a long rebuild. Some days I sit down to write out a thesis and nothing comes. That feels like evidence there's nothing there.
But there is. I'm just out of practice.
The people whose thinking feels distinctly theirs — they weren't born that way. They just stayed with it long enough that their way of seeing became clear. To themselves first, then to everyone else.