AI advice says get your ego out of the way. It is pointed at the wrong one. The judgment that says "that is wrong" before you can explain why is your most valuable, un-transferable asset. And it is quietly leaving the building.
If you've got a child in high school right now, or grandchildren coming up behind them...
You've probably already noticed something is off.
You might not have named it. But you've noticed.
And if you don't have a child in that position, you're seeing it show up in somebody's.
The 2024 NAEP reading results put a third of eighth graders below NAEP Basic.
A greater percentage than ever before.
It doesn't mean they can't read.
In the Governing Board's own words...
Those students likely could not identify basic literary elements in a text. The order of events. Character traits. The main idea.
That was two years ago.
Meanwhile, four out of five American students now use AI for schoolwork.
On top of that...
Recent reporting also suggests that a lot of schools still don't have a clear policy on it.
I'm not gonna draw a straight line between those two numbers.
I can't prove one, and plenty of people will try to sell you that line anyway.
Don't buy it from them either.
Because somewhere along the way we quietly reduced reading to "information retrieval."
Which is exactly why a chatbot feels like a clean substitute for it.
If reading is just "getting the information out of the text".
The machine obviously does it faster.
Can't argue that.
I want you to think about the last book that actually grabbed you by the eyeballs.
You weren't extracting anything.
You were wrestling with it.
Believing part of it, and holding the rest at arm's length.
Watching someone make a decision you could see the end of before they could.
And turning the page anyway because you needed to be wrong.
Imagination. Inference.
Climbing all up in the the nooks and crannies of possibilities, and peeking through new perspectives.
I love it. It's beautiful!
I'm addicted.
Because the good writers never tell you the thing.
Which means half (if not more) of what you took away, you built yourself.
Out of what wasn't on the page.
It's the same thing that allows you to carry a question for a hundred pages without needing it answered.
Nobody does that to "build cognitive capacity".
You do it because you wanna know what happens.
That's judgment.
It just doesn't announce itself that way.
Because you were enjoying yourself while it accrued.
Funny thing is...
It's the identical equipment you're running when you look at a deliverable, and know it's wrong a half-second before you could tell anybody why.
Same muscle. Different room.
A few weeks back I mentioned the workslop research out of Stanford's Social Media Lab and BetterUp.
Work that arrives looking finished and turns out to be hollow.
40% of workers had received some in the past month.
Costing about two hours of rework each time.
But there's a number in that study I skipped over, and it's the one that matters here.
Eighteen percent admitted they'd sent AI-generated work they knew was unhelpful, low effort, or low quality.
Depending on which write-up you read, that number starts at 18% and runs higher.
Depending on whether you're counting people who knew or people who weren't sure.
Pick whichever end you want.
It still doesn't change the thing underneath.
Roughly one in five people will tell a survey they sent work they knew was hollow. On the record. About themselves. 👀
Which means the check that would've stopped them either didn't run, or ran and got overruled.
Those aren't school age kids.
That's your team, your peers, the person you're handing something to on Monday.
We have decades of data on what happens to this capacity in children, because we've been measuring it in children for a long time.
We have almost nothing on what happens to it in a forty-eight-year-old consultant with a book of business, and two decades of pattern recognition behind him.
You've watched your child augment (if not fully outsource) the reading.
And you've had a feeling about it you probably didn't say out loud.
Because what are you gonna do?
Take the tools away from him while his whole class is using them?
So sit with the possibility that you, your peers, and your employees have been running an adult version of the same trade off.
First you stop reading the output as carefully, because "it's been fine" the last nine times.
The work goes out.
Nobody complains.
Which you file as confirmation instead of what it actually is, which is silence.
What you notice instead is that you've stopped being sure you're still the person they hired.
And the thing about it is, nobody grades you on any of this.
Nothing comes home in the spring.
You find out when something important goes out the door.
And there was nobody left in the building who could tell it was wrong.
And somehow we've collapsed them into one word.
The first is what everybody means when they say it.
The way we see ourselves. Our point of view. Typical stuff.
The assumption we'll defend past its expiration date.
The position you hold onto because letting go of it costs you something you're not ready to lose.
That one's already earned its reputation.
Which is most of the problem.
It's the thing that says no, that's not right before you could explain why.
The nine seconds where you already know, sitting on top of twenty years of figuring out how to know it.
Look at what happens when a company loses each one.
That's the first ego, protecting the thing that had made them right.
Ford ran both failures.
Last year they let the veteran engineers go, leaned the quality process on AI...
And found out there was nobody left who could tell it when it was wrong.
They spent this year hiring 350 of them back.
And everybody in those rooms was smart.
Not one of them was an idiot.
Which should tell you something uncomfortable about how much protection being smart actually buys you.
Now let me say the part I don't think we give enough attention to.
That second ego is an asset.
Not a personality trait, not a quirk you've earned the right to keep.
An asset.
Take the cash and contracts off the table...
And it's most of what your business is actually worth.
It's mostly you!
It's also the one asset that doesn't transfer.
A lot of times, anybody buying your business is buying a spreadsheet, and a hope that you'll stay.
And it's the one thing right now that people are not paying enough attention to.
The irony I keep running into is this.
In some cases, that can be good advice.
It's just pointed at the wrong one.
The first ego is doing fine. Thriving, actually.
It's why your competitor is still telling himself his clients would never notice the difference.
The second one is quietly leaving the building.
There's a thing you probably haven't said to anybody.
Not to your spouse, not to your business partner.
Not to the colleagues you've known since your first company.
You're not entirely sure the thing you're best at is still, yours.
And you didn't decide that.
Nobody does.
That's what makes it so hard to catch in yourself.
There's no "moment" where you sit down, and decide to stop exercising your own judgment.
It goes one efficiency at a time, and every one of them is defensible on its own.
BCG measured what that costs.
The ones hit hardest make 39% more major errors.
And on top of that...
Sit with that last one.
Because it runs backwards from what you'd expect.
The people closest to the exit aren't the ones falling behind on AI.
They're the ones deepest in it. The early adopters.
The ones you'd point to if somebody asked whether your team was keeping up.
That's not people getting lazy.
That's your best asset walking toward the door while the dashboard says everything's fine.
One line from it has stuck with me since.
"Your clients won't measure you by how many tools you recommend. They'll measure you by whether you helped them see what mattered before it was obvious."
I still believe that.
What I missed is that I wrote it pointing outward.
That you'll spot what matters.
And the only question is whether you say it.
But you can't help somebody see what's coming in their business if the equipment you'd use to see it is quietly eroding in yours.
That's the part I didn't account for.
And it's why "pay closer attention" was never going to be the answer.
There's no technique for noticing something you can't see.
What you can do is arrange to have that reflected back to you.
Which nobody enjoys.
Sitting still while somebody walks you through what you've been getting wrong is genuinely unpleasant.
And it doesn't magically get less unpleasant the more successful you are.
It gets worse.
That's most of why the first ego wins.
Not because people are arrogant.
But because the alternative costs something real in the moment, and the bill for avoiding it doesn't arrive for years.
Again.
The irony is, that's where the two egos finally sort themselves out.
The first one assures you you'd notice.
The second one, the one worth defending, can sit across from somebody and say..
Tell me what I'm not seeing.
That isn't humility, by the way.
Humility is the performance.
A fair amount of the humility being performed about AI right now is cover for having stopped thinking.
This is the opposite.
Same disposition as turning the page because you needed to be wrong about the character.
You don't do that because you doubt yourself.
You do it because you'd rather find out.
There are three door.
And two of them have the same defect.
You already have the judgment, that was never the problem.
It isn't that nothing's documented.
It's that the documented part is the steps, and the valuable part is knowing when the steps are wrong.
That part can't train anything and can't be audited - including by you.
An SOP that stopped working gets flagged. An assumption that stopped working just keeps running.
The one who gets asked the questions that aren't in the SOP.
The one who can tell you why you turned that client down, not just that you did.
Both are inside.
The person who'd run the diagnostic is the person whose assumption it is.
You're too far into your own business to extract yourself from it, and your internal candidate can't audit against a standard nobody has written down.
Door three isn't better because outside people are smarter.
They're usually not.
It's better because it's the only seat that isn't inside the thing it's trying to see.
Your judgment stops being a thing you personally have to be present for.
Someone else in your business can run the call and reach the answer you'd have reached. The AI stops improvising and starts amplifying a pattern you defined.
The work that goes out has your thinking in it whether or not you touched it that week.
And the thing you've been quietly worried about losing turns out to be the most valuable thing you own.
Not just because it exists somewhere other than in your head - because now it's somewhere it can be argued with.
That's not a productivity outcome.
That's a business somebody would buy.
If any of this landed...
Here's the honest next step for you.
I run a paid diagnostic called the Profit Compass Blueprint.
Ninety minutes on your actual numbers.
It's $1,497, credited in full if we work together.
Net cost in that case is zero.
And if you'd rather not, that's fine.
Take the next four weeks, and do something with them anyway.
Ask the question you've been avoiding about the client who's gone quiet.
Find the person carrying the thing nobody wrote down, and write it down.
Document it. Systematize it.
Automate it to your heart's content.
It's very good at that.
It's had a lot of practice.
So which one have you been defending?
Stay sharp,
Colin Taylor
Creator of The Asset Alchemy Method™
P.S. That's four. Thanks for staying with it. This one covered more ground than I planned when I started. If you came in late, the first three are worth the backtrack: the squeeze your clients are caught in, where the ROI actually went, and why Ford paid the same bill twice (and how you can avoid making the same mistake).
National Assessment Governing Board, "10 Takeaways from the 2024 NAEP Results" https://www.nagb.gov/powered-by-naep/the-2024-nations-report-card/10-takeaways-from-2024-naep-results.html
NAEP 2024 Reading Assessment, Grades 4 and 8, National Center for Education Statistics https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/reports/reading/2024/g4_8/?grade=8
Stanford HAI, 2026 AI Index Report, Chapter 7: Education https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/education
Niederhoffer, Kellerman, Lee, Liebscher, Rapuano, and Hancock, "AI-Generated 'Workslop' Is Destroying Productivity," Harvard Business Review, September 22, 2025 https://hbr.org/2025/09/ai-generated-workslop-is-destroying-productivity
Axios, "AI 'workslop' sabotages productivity, study finds," September 24, 2025 https://www.axios.com/2025/09/24/ai-workslop-workplace-efficiency-study
Fortune, "AI promised to revolutionize productivity. Instead, 'workslop' is a giant time suck and the scourge of the 21st century office, Stanford warns," September 23, 2025 https://fortune.com/2025/09/23/ai-workslop-workshop-workplace-communication
Benzinga, "The $9 Million Problem: How AI-Generated 'Workslop' Is Costing Companies" https://www.aol.com/finance/9-million-problem-ai-generated-003107787.html
Bedard, Kropp, Hsu, Karaman, Hawes, and Rosen Kellerman, "When Using AI Leads to 'Brain Fry,'" Harvard Business Review, March 5, 2026 https://hbr.org/2026/03/when-using-ai-leads-to-brain-fry
What happens to a business when institutional knowledge is lost?
The business loses the judgment that catches errors before they ship. When the people who could tell that work was wrong leave, or stop exercising that judgment, flawed work goes out with nobody left in the building to catch it. Ford let veteran engineers go, leaned quality on AI, and spent the next year rehiring 350 of them. The value that walks out is the un-transferable asset: the ability to know something is wrong before you can explain why.
What is AI workslop and how much does it cost?
Workslop is AI-generated work that arrives looking finished and turns out to be hollow. Research from Stanford's Social Media Lab and BetterUp found 40 percent of workers received workslop in the past month, costing about two hours of rework each time. Roughly 18 percent of workers admitted they had knowingly sent AI-generated work they knew was unhelpful, low effort, or low quality.
Why does AI oversight make a company's best people more likely to quit?
BCG research found workers under high AI oversight demand show 14 percent more mental effort, 12 percent more fatigue, and 19 percent more information overload. The ones hit hardest make 39 percent more major errors and are 39 percent more likely to consider leaving. Counterintuitively, the people closest to the exit are not those falling behind on AI, but the deepest-in early adopters you would point to as proof your team is keeping up.
What makes a service business worth buying rather than just an expensive job?
A business becomes sellable when the owner's judgment stops being a thing the owner must personally be present for. When someone else can run the call and reach the answer the owner would have reached, when AI amplifies a defined pattern rather than improvising, and when the owner's thinking is in the work whether or not they touched it that week, the judgment exists somewhere it can be argued with, not just in the founder's head. That is the difference between a business somebody would buy and a spreadsheet plus a hope the founder stays.
How do you protect business judgment from eroding in the AI age?
You cannot fix a blind spot by paying closer attention, because there is no technique for noticing something you cannot see. The protection is to arrange to have it reflected back to you from a seat that is not inside the business. The Asset Alchemy Profit Compass Blueprint is a paid diagnostic that scores where judgment is currently trapped and puts a dollar figure on what leaving it there is costing.
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