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AI adoption pressure is real. Everyone is starting to feel it.

You see it everywhere. LinkedIn posts promising productivity miracles. YouTube tutorials on the latest ChatGPT hack. Consultants selling AI transformation packages.

But most people are doing AI adoption wrong.

They outsource thinking to AI. Ask it to write their proposals. Generate their strategy. Create their content. Make their decisions.

The results? Inconsistent output. Half-finished projects gathering digital dust. Generic work that sounds like everyone else. A growing sense of inadequacy.

That's the Thinking Crisis.

And it's not getting better. It's accelerating.

Taskers, people who execute instructions rather than generate vision, are dying by a 1,000 cuts. Each AI improvement eliminates another task-based opportunity. Each automation closes another door for instruction followers.

The carpetbaggers know this. They're selling AI magic to people who need AI thinking. They promise tools will save you. They won't.

Because the problem isn't your tools, it's your operating system.

The world is splitting into two tribes.

Asset owners and instruction followers.

People who create assets and people who are chasing AI magic.

This isn't new. It's always been true. But AI is exposing the divide at unprecedented speed.

Communities form around leaders with vision, not people optimizing execution. You can see it everywhere. People don't follow the best task manager. They follow the person going somewhere interesting.

They want movements, not efficiency hacks.

Kevin O'Leary once said something revealing about Steve Jobs. Yes, Jobs was challenging to work with. Everyone knows that story. But O'Leary saw something else, something only one other person he'd met possessed.

Signal detection.

Jobs could identify the 3-5 critical things that needed to happen in 18 hours. Everything else was noise. That's compartmentalization. That's what separated him from brilliant people who never built anything that mattered.

AI amplifies this divide.

Feed AI tasks, and you get task optimization. Feed it strategy, you get strategic leverage. Feed it your thinking, and you build capacity. Feed it prompts you copied from Twitter; you rent someone else's intelligence.

The tool doesn't decide. Your operating system does.

And most people are running the wrong one.

The winners aren't learning one tool. They're not mastering one automation. They're creating assets using a compounding system.

By the end of 2026, the gap between these two groups won't be bridgeable.

Will you be a Tool User or a THINK Strategist?

The old game was simple: Ask AI to think for you.

Copy prompts from AI gurus. Sign up for the latest automation tool. Looking for a magic trick that'll save your job or scale your business without the work.

"ChatGPT, write my proposal."
"Claude, create my strategy."
"AI, tell me what to do."

Looking for an Oracle with all the answers with no context.

But it doesn't. It has patterns. Aggregated human output. Statistical predictions of what words follow other words.

It can't separate signal from noise for you. It can't identify your 3-5 critical things. It can't decide your priorities.

That's your job.

The old game focused on learning tools. Mastering platforms. Memorizing prompts. Following tutorials.

This creates a hamster wheel.

New tool launches. You learn it. Another one appears. You pivot. Your "Skills" become a collection of disconnected activities that don't build on each other.

Nothing compounds. Nothing creates equity. You're always starting over.

When you outsource thinking, you become a Tool User. You're renting intelligence instead of building capacity. You're dependent on the tool to do what you should be doing, and you add your thinking clearly to the problem before jumping to solutions.

This creates a vicious cycle.

You get inconsistent results because your inputs rely on borrowed thinking. So you assume you need better prompts. More complex workflows. Fancier tools.

You don't. You need better thinking.

The old game makes you weaker, not stronger. You're training yourself to untrain yourself. You're building a tool’s capacity while depleting your own.

By the end of 2026, Tool Users will wonder what happened. How they got left behind despite "using AI every day."

The new game flips the script entirely.

Winners create assets enabled by AI tools.

Not outputs. Assets.

Not one-time results. Reusable systems.

Not responses to prompts. Digital Employees that execute your thinking repeatedly.

This is the difference between tactics and strategy. Between doing and building. Between Tool User and Strategist.

Tool Users consume AI. Strategists create with it.

The shift isn't about learning one tool. It's not about mastering one automation. It's about rising to a different level of thinking entirely.

It's about installing YOUR thinking into any piece of software.

Not AI's thinking into your work. YOUR thinking into AI's execution.

Build assets that embed your brain into them. Create systems that expand your capacity without adding time.

Change the way you evaluate, analyze, and solve problems into reusable frameworks.

This is the Builder-to-Strategist journey.

You stop asking "What can AI do for me?" and start asking "What asset can I create with it?"

That's a different question entirely.

It requires you to get clear on your process. Your evaluation criteria. Your decision framework. Your quality standards.

Most people have never articulated these. They're implicit. Intuitive. In your head.

The new game forces you to make them explicit.

And that's where the magic happens.

Because once you've added your thinking into an asset, you own something. You've created intellectual property. A Digital Employee that executes your standards consistently.

You build once. Deploy repeatedly. Compound value.

That's not automation. That's leverage.

By the end of 2026, it won't look like everyone else’s. You’ll own a portfolio of assets. Libraries of your thinking. Systems that control.

THINK is the operating system for this shift.

Not an automation methodology. YOUR methodology, executed by AI.

This is how you rise from Tool User to Strategist.

This is where leverage appears. This is where you separate from everyone learning the same ChatGPT tricks.

This is where learning accelerates, where assets appreciate, where Strategists pull away from Tool Users.

THINK isn't about AI. It's about installing a better operating system for how you approach problems. AI exposes whether you have one.

The difference between Tool User and Strategist isn't technical knowledge. It's asset creation.

By the end of 2026, your THINK portfolio determines your opportunities.

Let me show you how I go about building assets.

Most people would outsource writing to AI. Ask ChatGPT to write its newsletter. Hope Claude produces something good.

I didn't do that.

I have a writing process. Standards.

I wanted AI to help my workflow and make me think better. Not replace my thinking.

So I built a better way to capture ideas aligned with my process using NotebookLM.

Here's what I did:

I uploaded my writing process to NotebookLM. Not random articles. My actual thinking about what I write about, my goals, my principles, and templates.

Market opportunities. Signals. Research patterns. My evaluation criteria for what's worth writing about versus what's noise. I used Gemini 3 to work through how to build out sources and notes for my notebook. It is my version of signals

Then I let NotebookLM process it.

Now, when I research topics, I have a filter that separates the signal from the noise based on MY standards. Not generic AI output. My thinking, systematized.

It takes away all the noise.

When I see market signals, I run them through this system. It evaluates based on my mandate. Tells me if this aligns with what I actually write about. Saves me from chasing shiny objects.

What changed:

Before: I'd see interesting topics, jot them in Apple Notes, and waste time exploring things that didn't fit my mandate.

After: I have a system that filters based on my thinking. Noise eliminated. Signal amplified.

Same tools everyone else has access to. Different approach entirely.

I didn't outsource thinking. I embedded it.

That's the difference between Tool User and Strategist.

By the end of 2026, I'll have a dozen of these notebooks.

Tool Users will still be asking ChatGPT to write their content.

Here's what most people miss about working this way.

This wasn't democratically decided. You didn't vote on this. Neither did I.

Governments decided. Investors committed. Trillions deployed.

Every major economy calls AI critical infrastructure. The U.S. AI executive order. China's AI development plan. EU AI regulations. Global competition for computing resources.

This is the new nuclear arms race.

Whether you like it or not, whether you want AI in your work or not, it's coming. The people who control investment have decided for you.

So be bullish on reality, not hype.

The reality is this: AI will enter your work. The question isn't whether. It's whether you control how it executes your thinking.

But here's the economic truth.

Tool Users rent capacity. Every month, they pay subscriptions to access intelligence they don't own. They're dependent on platforms.

They create no equity. Learn a tool, and it changes. Master a platform, it pivots. Nothing you build transfers when the tool evolves.

Strategists own assets. They build systems that embed their thinking. They control how AI executes their work.

When the tool changes, the asset adapts. When the platform pivots, the thinking remains. What you build compounds because it's based on YOUR operating system, not the tool's features.

The economics are fundamentally different.

Tool Users trade time for output.

Strategists build once, deploy many. More output doesn't require proportionally more time.

By the end of 2026, the gap between these two groups will be staggering.

Not because Strategists learned more tools. Because they created more assets.

THINK isn't "better AI prompts."

It's a fundamentally different operating system.

Tool Users ask: "What can AI do for me?"
Builders ask: "What asset can I create?"
Strategists ask: "How does this compound?"

The gap between these isn't technical skill. It's not about knowing Python or understanding models.

It's signal detection.

Can you identify the 3-5 critical things in 18 hours? Can you separate what matters from what's noise? Can you focus on your priorities?

Steve Jobs had this. Kevin O'Leary saw it. That's what separated Jobs from brilliant people who never built anything that mattered.

AI won't teach you this. It exposes whether you have it.

When you use AI, what gets revealed? Are you feeding it clear thinking or hoping it'll think for you? Are you creating assets or consuming outputs?

That answer determines which tribe you're in.

And tribes are forming fast.

Communities aren't gathering around the best Tool Users. They're forming around Strategists with vision. People are going somewhere interesting. Leaders building movements, not optimizing tasks.

You feel the pressure. To adopt AI before you get left behind.

But better at what?

Not better at prompting. Better at thinking.

Not better at using tools. Better at building assets.

Not better at following instructions. Better at generating vision.

Not learning one tool. Not mastering one automation. Rising to a higher level entirely.

The Strategist level.

By the end of 2026, where will you be?

Still chasing the latest AI guru’s tool review?

Or will you have risen? Will you own assets that compound? Will you have Digital Employees executing your thinking? Will you have created assets that appreciate with use?

The difference isn't what you learn. It's what you build.

That's the category shift THINK represents.

Take the Strategist Diagnostic.

Find out if you're a Tool User, Builder, or Strategist.

Most people think they're further along than they are. Take our free diagnostic to see where you are and decide where you want to go in 2026.

Happy New Year,

Marvin