I attended a newsletter event recently where people were worried about AI replacing creative work. I argued the opposite: AI is only a threat if you don’t put in the reps. In fact, I think AI will make the best among us even better than the dilletantes.

This piece explains why.

The Lure of Shortcuts

Human beings love shortcuts.

Every marketing pitch promises not just results, but fast results. Think “7-minute abs,” Tim Ferriss’ famous “Four-Hour Workweek” (lol), and every self-help guru’s “30 days to a better ___”. People keep pitching crap like this because it sells.

Ultimately what they are tapping into is the natural human desire for instant gratification. We want the abs, the wealth, or the transformed version of ourselves but we don’t have the tolerance for the pain needed to get there. (If these things were easy to get, everyone would have them.) So we delude ourselves into thinking this well-packaged, slick shortcut is going to get us there. As 8-time Mr. Olympia champion Ronnie Coleman once said, “Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.”

In the age of generative AI, we now have an amazing shortcut to become “a writer” or “an artist” or whatever. We can now get an output—an article, an image—without much of the effort that humans needed to make these things in ages past.

We can all be bodybuilders now without lifting any heavy-ass weights.

This is good news, right?

The Effort Is the Point

It’s great news, but not for everyone. It’s great news for those of us who remain willing to continue lifting the weights even though a powerful shortcut exists to becoming a bodybuilder for everyone else.

I often say that I don’t write for my audience—I write for myself, largely to organize my own thoughts. When I go on a podcast and people say I am dropping wisdom bombs left and right, that doesn’t come out of nowhere—that’s the product of me having spent 1.5 years writing every week whether I feel like it or not.

The value is not in the outputs but in the thousands of hours I have spent.

We become good at whatever we spend time doing. This is because knowledge, skill and experience are all functions of the density and strength of neural pathways in our brain. As they are used, neural pathways literally alter their physical structure—the connections become thicker and the neurons themselves develop more bumps and ridges called “dendrites.”

I used to like summary and synthesis threads on Twitter—things like “I read 150 of Warren Buffet’s investor letters so you don’t have to—here are the top 10 takeaways.” I hate all that stuff now. The biggest benefit of reading 150 of Warren Buffett’s investor letters is not the 10 best takeaways, but rather the hundreds of hours I’d spend grappling with his ideas. The time spent grappling, the thinking, the mental friction, and producing the 10 synthesized ideas yourself is what produces the neural pathway density that denotes mastery. Not reading someone else’s summary of what they learned.

Effort Is Equity, and AI Tools Are Leverage

I want to bring this back to a finance analogy: effort is equity, outputs are cash flows, and AI tools are leverage.

I liken this process of putting effort into a task as analogous to building equity in a business. Equity, as a source of financing, has a few properties:

1)      It is stable

2)      It helps the business to weather shocks

3)      It is expensive

As we discussed above, building up your skills is hard and time-consuming (expensive). However, true expertise is something that is something that people can’t take away from you (stable) and helps you to weather shocks in your profession, because it’s also not easily copied.

I see AI tools as leverage for creative work. In finance, leverage is a force multiplier. Relying entirely on leverage exposes a business to fatal risk from even small changes in the business environment, but leverage stacked on top of a sturdy equity base is extremely powerful.

This is how I feel about using AI in my own work—I can do financial analysis 10x faster than before, but only because I already know enough about the subject to direct the AI to do what I want it to do. For example, I tell my students that I use ChatGPT to write our lectures. But even though AI wrote a big portion of the slides, none of my students would be able to deliver the lecture because they don’t know enough about the subject! Only I can give the lecture.

The output of our equity and leverage—like writing or art—is the cash flow. A company with a weak capital structure doesn’t produce cash flows worth very much. In a highly levered company, cash flows that get eaten up by debt service—like content produced by AI that anyone can make—doesn’t command much interest from the market.

Build up the equity base first, use leverage intelligently, and the cash flows will come.

Exercise

Journal on the following or discuss with a friend.

1)      Shortcuts

Where do I rely on shortcuts in my primary industry or career?

Do I use the shortcuts because I have already mastered the basics, or am I attempting to skip learning the fundamentals by relying on shortcuts?

2)      Equity Base

In what aspects of my work do I notice that I am much better than new people because I have invested extensive time, measured in the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of hours?

Where else do I need to invest extensive time in order to get to the next level?

What resistance do I feel, if any, about investing the time?

Where do I feel the pull, if any, of using a shortcut to circumvent investing the time?

3)      Leverage

Where can I use leverage—such as artificial intelligence, or any other source of leverage—to turbocharge the returns on the equity foundation (my expertise) that I have already built, and will continue to build?