Hey Reader,

Something happened in a meeting a few months back that I keep chewing on.

I was sitting with a colleague, working through a technical problem that required careful thought and thorough analysis. As I was doing this, I caught myself getting frustrated. Not with him. With the pace.

I wanted the answer, not the work that produced it. I wanted to skip the part where you sit in it. I wanted to be done before I had started.

So I stayed at the surface. I knew I was doing it as I did it, and yet I did it anyway. The brilliant part is that he called me out on it, and it led to a great conversation about how AI is making deep work harder to stomach.

Here's what bothers me about this. My results with AI are the best they've ever been. The tools aren't the problem. The problem is what they've trained me to expect, and what I do now when the work refuses to cooperate, or when I'm working on other tasks that aren't built to go fast.

Going deep feels like running in mud. It doesn't feel like work anymore. It feels like failure.

​Two weeks ago, I wrote that anyone can now reach a quality standard of 80%, and that now if you want to be the best, you're investing the time necessary to reach 99%. Here's the part I didn't say. If everybody can reach good quickly and nobody keeps the appetite for what comes after good, we don't end up with many capable people. We end up homogenized to the middle, and comfortable there.

I see it in teams, not just in myself. AI produces more than your people can absorb, so your deck gets skimmed, your analysis gets scanned, your memo gets a nod, and nobody gets under the covers.

What's actually at stake here is wisdom, and wisdom has never been cheap. You earn it by doing the work. You earn it by going deeper than the moment required you to go. You earn it by choosing hard things on purpose, over and over, until your judgment is worth paying for.

None of that is fast. All of it is getting conditioned out of us.

Conditioning isn't fate, though. Nobody took anything from me in that meeting. The exit was sitting there. I walked through it, and the other door was open the whole time. That part is on me, and it's the only part that matters.

What I don't know is whether anybody chooses the other door at scale. What would change my mind is watching people go deeper on purpose. I'm not seeing it yet. It's just too easy to get good enough and confuse quantity with quality.

The best argument against me is that I might have it backward. Maybe nothing eroded. Maybe the work that used to require depth just doesn't anymore, and the deep work has moved somewhere else. But will I still have the tenacity and drive to do it?

When wisdom is the differentiator between good and great, and we are conditioned to avoid the work required to cultivate it, what happens next?

So run this test on yourself this week. Take the hardest problem on your desk and give it your complete and undivided attention. No draft to react to, nothing generated for you to edit. Just you and the problem. Then watch whether you get frustrated with the pace.

Then tell me how it felt. Does it feel like good deep work, or being stuck in the mud?

dusty

P.S. I recently reread Ryan Holiday's Wisdom Takes Work, and I couldn't stop thinking about my own experiences and observations. I'd like your perspective on the argument itself. Where does it hold up for you, and where doesn't it?