Cognitive Disciplines

We’re watching a show called The Diplomat on Netflix with Keri Russell. It’s great. It has season-one-House-of-Cards vibes. It’s sharp, tense, and intriguing. Keri Russell plays the U.S. Ambassador to the United Kingdom. And even though it has people working in intelligence, there’s almost no technology around. People talk on cellphones and occasionally they show something on a computer screen, but it’s almost devoid of technology. It’s just people talking, collaborating, and debating.

And that’s part of why I love it.

It’s about the people. It’s about the flow of information, the power of observation, and the ability to read and understand motives. Each character in the show builds their own perceptions, mental models, and intuition to navigate the complex apparatus of global politics. Their perspectives clash, combine, and eventually coalesce into a path.

Politics is a complex system that requires human interaction, experience, and understanding to facilitate. Key players labor over a single issue for days, weeks, and months so it can evolve and mature and grow into a tangible outcome. There’s nobody sitting on ChatGPT asking what they’re missing. The insights emerge from a laborious process of tension, friction, and compromise.

As AI collapses execution into a repetitive motion, the human collaboration becomes more valuable than ever. Learning how to write code or design isn’t knowing how to operate a text editor or draw shapes in Figma.

Designers visualize information, compress complexity, and communicate ideas.

Engineers define relationships, understand dependencies, and solve problems.

Ideas develop over time. Our team did an offsite in Brooklyn in December of 2025. Only now are those ideas maturing into the features we’re building into the product. You can’t force insights. Insights are personal. If you and I watch the same movie, we come away with different perspectives. The meaning of the movie for you may be radically different than what is for me. It’s personal. It’s felt.

Perspectives are the raw material required to seed, nurture, and grow ideas. You can’t bypass the process of development if you want to create high-quality outputs. Claude can’t make an amazing product on its own. It requires human operators who engage in the intentional process of idea maturation.

To be successful in the future we’re heading toward requires Cognitive Disciplines:

1. Logical Reasoning teaches you to think.
2. Sound Judgment teaches you to decide.
3. Adaptive Learning teaches you to respond.

Logical Reasoning

Sitting with an idea is one of the most important parts of the creative process.

You can’t rush it.

The idea develops at its own pace. Some come to life quickly and others over years.

Take the offsite we had as a team. We spent time together over meals, in a meeting room, and walking around the city. We changed environments, talked about work and personal life, and let our thinking evolve slowly.

Opening each new day’s session by asking everyone to share what new thoughts they have is a sign of the value in slow thinking.

The responses are illuminating.

Someone calls to mind something one person shared on a sticky note and what another person shared in a dinner conversation, connecting seemingly disparate ideas into a coherent whole. The free-flowing exchange of ideas stimulates creativity and broadens the collective intelligence.

Independent thinking and collaborative discussion is where innovation emerges.

You think, I think, and we share our perspectives in a medley of coalition.

But what’s happening with AI now?

Independent thinking is replaced with blindly accepting the output of a machine.

Collaborative discussion is replaced with siloed AI chats and biased context.

Complex systems, including humans, gravitate toward entropy. We seek comfort and approval. Yet the paradox is all growth and knowledge comes through discomfort and intentional divergence from the mean.

We’re acting as interpreters of information without taking part in the creation or management of it. Our brains relax into the habit of safety and we surrender cognition.

Logical Reason teaches you how to think.

When I think about my job at the most abstract level, I define it as:

Managing the flow of information into impact by orchestrating intelligence.

Any intelligence relies on data to build information, knowledge, and understanding. Whether you’re managing humans or AI, you need to understand your thinking so you can build a narrative around the information.

Independent thinking allows you to read, write, and walk as you let ideas mature.

Collaborative discussion lets you think out loud and integrate your thinking with others.

Logical Reasoning is the stream of understanding weaving through it all. You don’t just know what you and others think. You know how and why you got there. If you rush to the output, you miss the opportunity to capture the key moments along the way. And if AI collapses execution, why not spend more time thinking, writing, and talking? That’s simply better context to make decisions.

Clarity of understanding creates clarity of action.

Sound Judgement

I was talking to a colleague about the value of these timeless skills in the age of AI.

“How can you hire for that?” they asked.

I always try to hire someone by figuring out how they think. Every part of the interview process is designed to simulate what it would be like to work with someone. You won’t ever know what it’s like until you actually work with them—under pressure, every day.

But that’s only one side of the equation.

How do they think? How do they approach problems? How do they choose a solution?

What’s the most important thing to work on right now?

I ask myself this every day. I ask everyone I work with this, too.

You should ask this question every day.

People are using things like OpenClaw to build always-on AI assistants to scour their data sources and tell them what to focus on. For the same reason I would never let someone manage my emails or my calendar or my tasks, I won’t let AI, either. Finding the signal in the noise requires information immersion—connecting to all of the information directly yourself. I see every Linear issue, every piece of product feedback, and engage actively with the flow of information. I use AI to collect and categorize the information, but I don’t remove myself from the process. I need to feel the information to make better decisions.

Sound Judgment teaches you to decide.

You can’t make good decisions without good context. And you can’t understand what’s good context if you don’t engage with it.

Deciding the most important thing to work on right now is how I hone my intuition.

It requires a deep understanding of:

1. The Opportunity Space to know what’s possible and what your options are.
2. The Temporal Space to understand and simulate timing of the work.
3. The Structural Space to understand relationships and dependencies.

Answering the question applies the same principles of understanding you can use to answer for your team. I don’t just decide what I should work on. I also decide what the rest of the team should work on. Again, AI can help, but it shouldn’t be making decisions for you.

Collect your thinking in a Thinking Project to make the best decision right now.

And then respond when things change.

Adaptive Learning

I was recently asked by a friend for advice on structuring a project. They wanted to know the best way to create a system around a goal to actually achieve it. Thinking out loud, I shared how I would approach the work:

1. Define a clear outcome. Start by picturing the end state. Create a clear picture in your mind for the ideal outcome.
2. Identify the next step. Don’t worry about steps 2-20. Just focus on the first step that moves you in the right direction.
3. Generate a feedback loop. Embrace friction in each step to capture feedback to inform the next step in the process.

Know your direction, create momentum, and learn through each iteration.

It might seem like an oversimplification, but simple processes work when they’re supported by foundational principles. If you understand the forces at play, you can harness them to move work forward.

Adaptive Learning teaches you to respond.

Understand your thinking to make intentional decisions and learn from the process. Every type of work benefits from this approach, whether you’re trying to run a marathon or build a new feature in your product. You can’t run without putting your shoes on; or build a feature without knowing what you want to build.

There is always a small first step.

Software projects fail because the plan is defined at the beginning of the process, yet remains rigid and unchanged even when new information arrives. Why? Because we did all that work to define the project and plan it.

But it’s all guesswork until you do the work.

You reason, you make decisions, and then you learn from reality. You adapt. Knowing the end state helps you keep the course and make micro-adjustments along the way—like a runner slowing their pace to avoid burning out early in the race; or a product team cutting scope to get the work in user’s hands.

We defined a pretty big vision at the team offsite. And we’ve been working toward that vision in iterative steps. When we release a new feature, we use the feedback to direct the next iteration. New ideas emerge with every release. Our most-loved feature released this year wasn’t even discussed at the offsite. It came from watching market trends and meeting customers where they already are.

If you’re too focused on what you said you’d do, you miss the clear signals telling you what you really should do. Learning is an adaptation to new information, like muscle fibers growing stronger after strength training.

If you can’t adapt, you never learn.

The Practice

Learning fundamental disciplines will help you more than any process because you can use them to create whatever process you need, whenever you need it. Feed someone and they will go hungry tomorrow, but give them seeds to grow their own food and they will never go hungry. If you read enough content in the product world, you get a meal. It tastes good until you are starving and don’t know how to satiate the hunger. Playbooks, frameworks, and processes are ephemeral. They exist as a temporary tactic. Drawing from principles and philosophies allows you to express practices to follow. I say this because I offer examples to practice these ideas, but it’s primarily about giving you the seeds. Make it yours.

Practicing the Cognitive Disciplines is simple:

1. Explain your thinking. Define an explicit reasoning for why you’re doing it.
2. Make a decision. Prioritize and use your judgement to make a clear decision.
3. Review the outcomes. Focus on what happened and how it affects next steps.

The Throughline

Watching The Diplomat, I had a thought:

AI can’t replace this work.

That kind of work is more important than ever as AI influences global opinion and policy decisions. AI will permeate every aspect of work. Politics is no exception.

Knowing how to control information, read people, and find common ground in a chaotic mess of conflicting ideologies and mass misinformation is special work.

And it’s the kind of work for humans.

I’m not anti-AI by any means. I use it every day. It has fundamentally reshaped how I work on almost every level. But I’m also mindful and intentional in its use. I refuse to lose my critical thinking or abandon the parts of the process that bring me joy. Why would I? I’m not here on this planet for a fleeting moment so I can babysit a machine while it mechanically does the work I enjoy.

I’m writing this newsletter. Just me. I’m embracing the friction as I struggle to find the right words to express my thoughts. In that struggle is where clarity emerges. It’s work that benefits me and, hopefully, you. If you want to read LLM-generated slop, nothing is stopping you. Just go look at LinkedIn. All originality is washed out with homogenized drivel seeking to appease an algorithm. Machines pitted against one another, vying for your attention. Novelty, insight, and innovation are participatory rewards. You can’t succeed if you refuse to be part of the work.

Are you here to try, to fail, to learn, to grow, to be an active participant in the work?

I am. I hope you are, too. Because we always need more independent thinkers.