I have a confession.
I use AI every day. I find it genuinely remarkable. It helps me think faster, research deeper, and draft things I would have spent hours on. I am not anti-AI. Not even close.
But I am starting to worry.
A colleague of mine, Alex Meyer, lives and breathes AI. He teaches it, trains organizations on it, and has been deep in the world of large language models longer than most. He told me recently, almost sheepishly, that he is finding it harder to do focused, deep thinking. And he is watching the same thing happen to his students.
That stopped me cold.
Here is what I think is happening. Every time I let AI do the thinking, I skip the struggle. And the struggle, it turns out, is where the thinking actually happens. The discomfort of not knowing. The effort of working through an idea. The moment when something finally clicks, because you earned it.
When I shortcut that, I get an answer. But I lose the understanding.
Tiago Forte, the author of the piece that sparked this reflection, coined the term “cognitive debt.” The idea landed hard. Every time we outsource our thinking, we borrow against our own mental capacity. The debt accumulates quietly, invisibly, until one day we reach for a thought and find the shelf is bare.
I coach leaders to build extraordinary companies. Strategic thinking is not optional in that work. It is the work. And if the very tool I use to help them think is quietly eroding my own ability to think clearly, that is a problem I cannot ignore.
AI is only as good as the mind directing it.
Use it. Absolutely. But do not let it replace the hard, slow, deeply human work of thinking for yourself. That capacity is not infinite. And once dulled, it does not simply come back.
Protect your mind like the asset it is.
