We’ve Got It Backwards: AI and Thought Leadership

Of course you should be using AI. The time you lose wrestling with writing is not how you should spend time right now - or ever again. But HOW you use it is the question.

Every week I look out my window and wonder how much longer I have with my two huge, beautiful ash trees.

Some of this started turning over in my mind after I met Peter Diamandis, someone who really challenges how we think about what’s possible with AI.

And how we’re still underusing it.

Like all good writing of mine, the thinking starts while while digging in the dirt, driving, reading, tinkering with tech, engines, walk and talks, and to my lack of joy, cooking. It’s not my gift.

Let me share a quick personal story.

The trees. I have two beloved ash trees.

And I am counting the months or years until the destructive emerald ash borer beetle will likely destroy almost every ash tree in Dallas / Fort Worth and far beyond.

And I’m devastated. To me, trees mean something so deep, it’s hard to articulate. Maybe you get it.

To know these might go the way of the chestnut and other extraordinary, beautiful trees absolutely crushes me.

(Thanks ChatGPT for a customized bar chart based on a couple sentences of a prompt)

I know that if it were just a few years later, machine learning could probably analyze all the data and we would figure out what to do.

Maybe the answer is not yet in the data we have now, but I think it might be.

Maybe it is a substance we sprinkle around the tree to repel this critter, or a formula that changes the permeability of the bark.

What hurts is that we are probably THIS CLOSE to a solution.

We are moving fast in understanding from beetles to cancer to a host of incredible discoveries and disease cures and day-to-day help with things even like my cooking issues.

So how does this connect to AI and our own thought leadership?

We are the ones who have to imagine the problem.

We are the ones who need to articulate it.

We have to create the space for possibility.

I’m to the point now where I try to not touch a task without trying to consider what AI tool can help me do it faster and better. I need tools that I can boss around and while I know no tool is perfect, it already can help me do things 10 times faster.

And that’s exactly what we want.

Because I need to still figure out cooking and be a mom and plot the eradication of the ash borer beetle.

AI can gather the data, the patterns, the what-ifs.

But we have to guide it.

This is a big shift.

And I think it is going to be painful to look back ten years from now and see how much further we could have gone, and how much faster, if we had not hesitated so much.

We need to reach for more in our own capabilities every day.

We need to push each other to do the thinking.

We do not use AI to help create thought leadership because we cannot think for ourselves.

We use it so we can go ten times faster.

We use it because we have to take all the genius of YOU reading this newsletter and drive you forward to go save the day.

Because I need to be figuring out how to keep the ash borer beetle from killing my beloved ash trees.

Not wasting time fretting over a LinkedIn post.

So write.
And write often.
Think with intention.

This post started as a voice note while I was making an omelet.

I was working through the ideas out loud.

Here’s the workflow I used:

• Record a voice note directly into ChatGPT’s voice recorder.

• The prompt with the voice note: Make this 100 percent me. Do not water down the strength of the ideas. Do not add anything. Just help me clean it up.

• Got help cleaning up exactly what I said

• Sharing it on Substack - this app that will allow me to blog and send out an email to folks at the same time.

That is how I am using AI.

Not to skip the thinking, but to give myself more room to do it.

Because I would rather be figuring out how to stop these trees from dying
than spending another hour second-guessing how a post is going to land.

We have to move faster than that.

There are more important things only we can do.

And we need to figure out what those things are.

Figure it out while writing - often.

Thanks for reading!

Julie Michelle Morris