The Danger of Outsourcing Your Thinking to AI

Listen to the audio version of the podcast on Apple or Spotify.

We are facing an epidemic of intellectual laziness. Leaders are handing over their creative output to machines.

They are letting their problem-solving muscles atrophy. They are making excuses.

...and they are wondering why they cannot break through to the next level.

This is a massive mistake.

Ryan Hawk has spent years studying the compounding practices of leadership high performance. He has interviewed hundreds of the world's most effective leaders on The Learning Leader Show.

His new book, The Price of Becoming, distills what separates the people who build lasting success from the ones who plateau.

I sat down with him to dig into the specific behaviors, mindsets, and practices that separate the good from the great.

What came out of that conversation was one of the most honest, direct, and practically useful discussions I have had on this show.

Connect with Ryan Hawk

• Website: https://learningleader.com/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanhawk12/

• Book: The Price of Becoming: https://amzn.to/4fz6nYt

The Danger of Outsourcing Your Thinking to AI

AI is an incredible tool. It can research. It can articulate. It can speed up your workflow by a factor of ten. But it cannot replace your unique perspective. It cannot generate your novel ideas. And if you let it do your thinking for you, your brain will atrophy the same way a muscle atrophies when you stop using it.

"I want you to get better at thinking through these hard problems instead of outsourcing that thinking," Hawk told me.

Studies have come out showing that your brain will literally shrink when you stop using it for complex problem-solving.

Think about what happens when you stop lifting weights. Your muscles get smaller. Your strength decreases. The same thing happens to your mind when you stop wrestling with hard ideas.

The leaders who will dominate the next decade are not the ones who use AI to replace their thinking.

They are the ones who combine the horsepower of AI research and articulation with their own novel ideas. They use AI as a research assistant. They use it to edit. They use it to speed up execution. But they never skip the messy, uncomfortable process of getting their own thoughts onto the page.

Hawk put it this way:

"If you completely outsource your creative output, you're less authentically you. And then you're going to have less of an opportunity for people to want to follow you."

People follow leaders they authentically know and trust. If your ideas are generated by a machine, that connection breaks. Your audience can feel it. Your team can feel it. Your customers can feel it.

There is also an AI Darwinism happening right now. The leaders who have always been thinkers, who have always journaled, who have always wrestled with ideas before AI existed, they will continue to do so. AI will amplify their output.

But the leaders who have been coasting on other people's ideas? This technology does not help them. A non-novel idea is going to suck whether AI is involved or not.

WATCH NEXT: The Agility Quotient: The Intelligence That Matters Now

Curiosity is a Love Language

Curiosity is not a nice-to-have trait. It is a fundamental driver of leadership high performance. It is how you build relationships. It is how you uncover new opportunities. It is how you stay sharp when everyone else is getting dull.

Ryan Hawk told me something that stopped me cold.

"The way that I give and receive love is curiosity."

Think about that. Curiosity as a love language. When you are genuinely interested in someone's story, where they came from, what they are building, what they are afraid of, you are showing them the ultimate form of respect. You are saying: you matter. Your experience matters. I want to understand you.

That kind of connection is rare. And it is magnetic.

Brian Koppelman, the creator of Billions, told Hawk years ago: "Chase down your curiosity and obsessions with great rigor." Hawk has never forgotten it. He has built an entire career on that one piece of advice.

The practical way to build your curiosity muscle is through daily prompts. Hawk shared one that I have been using ever since. At the end of every single day, ask yourself: "What specifically did I do today to go to bed a little bit wiser than I was when I woke up?"

Write down the answer. Know that you are going to have to write something down. That knowledge acts as a forcing function. It pushes you to go out into the world and be curious. Read an article. Talk to an expert. Learn something new. Ask a question you have been afraid to ask.

Stack those days. Day after day. Week after week. Year after year.

That is how knowledge compounds. Warren Buffett made the bulk of his money after the age of 60 because of the power of compounding. The same principle applies to your mind.

Small daily deposits of curiosity, stacked over the years, create an intellectual advantage that nobody can touch.

Why Any Excuse Softens the Character

Consistency is the price of admission for leadership high performance. Not talent. Not intelligence. Not connections. Consistency.

And the enemy of consistency is excuses.

Hawk shared a line from a poem that his friend Garen Stokes shares with him regularly. It hit me like a punch to the chest. "Any excuse, no matter where it comes from or what it is, softens the character."

Read that again.

Any excuse softens the character.

We all have that internal voice. The one that says you are a little tired today. The one that says you already worked hard this week. The one that says you can skip this one time and nobody will know. That voice is lying to you. Every time you listen to it, you get a little softer. A little weaker. A little further from the person you said you wanted to be.

Hawk described it as a daily fist fight to suffocate excuses. That framing is perfect. You do not negotiate with excuses. You do not reason with them. You suffocate them.

The practical system to win this fight has three components.

First, you make a commitment to yourself and you treat breaking that commitment as a character issue, not a scheduling issue. You did not miss your workout because you were busy. You softened your character. That reframe is brutal. It is also exactly what you need to hear.

Second, you use daily prompts. The end-of-day curiosity question is one. You can build others. The point is that you know, before the day starts, that you will have to answer for how you spent it.

Third, and this is the one most leaders skip, you build a team of truth tellers.

Who Are Your Truth Tellers?

Every leader needs people in their life who are willing to say the uncomfortable thing. The people who will look you in the eye and tell you that you are not living up to your own standards. The people who will call you out when your ego is getting too big. The people who will say: "Dude, that's not it. We made a commitment. Let's go."

These people are gold.

Most leaders push them away. They surround themselves with yes-people. They get comfortable. They stop growing. And then they wonder why they hit a ceiling.

Hawk is intentional about maintaining truth tellers in his life, especially as his platform grows. Fame is a trap. The more successful you become, the easier it is to lose touch with reality. The truth tellers keep you grounded. They keep you honest. They keep you sharp.

The key is how you receive the feedback when it comes. Hawk shared a powerful framework for this. When he gets critical feedback, even if his initial reaction is that the person is wrong, he takes it to his wife on their nightly walk. He asks: "Are they right? Is there a chance that part of this is correct?"

That question is everything. It creates space between the ego's reaction and the rational response. It gives you a chance to process the feedback instead of defending against it.

Coachable Leaders Always Win

There is nothing more intoxicating as a leader than someone who is coachable.

I have seen this play out in my own business over and over again. I hired experienced producers who thought they knew everything. They underperformed. I hired people with less experience who were hungry, open, and willing to do whatever it took. They dominated.

"No one I know who is successful over the long term is closed off to feedback. Nobody. Short-term success, 100% possible. Long-term success, I have never met one in my life."

Hawk has a hiring bias toward people who played team sports and people who served in the military. Not because of the skills they learned, but because of the ego deaths they experienced. In team sports, you get coached constantly.

You get called out in front of your teammates. You face adversity every single game. You learn how to take a hit and keep going.

That is a portable lesson for every area of life.

His daughter plays volleyball. He loves watching her play because of how many times she loses within a single match. A five-set match might have 100 or more points where she made a mistake, got blocked, or got crushed. And every single time, she has to immediately reset. Next play. Let's go.

That next-play mentality is what separates the people who build lasting success from the ones who crumble under pressure.

The Price of Becoming

The title of Hawk's book is a perfect summary of everything we discussed. There is a price to becoming the leader you want to be. That price is paid in daily consistency. It is paid in ego deaths. It is paid in hard conversations with truth tellers. It is paid in the discipline to suffocate excuses every single day.

Most people are not willing to pay that price. They want the result without the process. They want the trophy without the losses. They want the success without the failure.

That is not how it works.

The leaders who find their easy mode, the ones who make their work look effortless, have paid that price for years. They have stacked days of curiosity, consistency, and coachability into a compound interest account that nobody can touch.

You can do the same thing. Start today. Ask yourself tonight what you did to go to bed a little bit wiser than you were when you woke up. Find your truth tellers. Suffocate your excuses. Stay coachable.

That is leadership high performance. And that is the price of becoming.

• Listen to the full audio version of the podcast: https://linktr.ee/ryan_hanley

• Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtube.com/ryanmhanley

• Subscribe to the newsletter: https://ryanhanley.com/subscribe

This is the way.

Hanley.