Developing Your Ideas Is Your Most Important Work

I’m not a Luddite. I appreciate how AI-backed tools can help me improve my writing. I use Gmail’s suggestions to compose more concise emails. Grammarly has become my defacto comma police, helping me with a grammar skill I’ve never quite grasped. I often have a tab open for ChatGPT to help me brainstorm synonyms, come up with titles, or rephrase confusing sentences. AI is a helpful writing tool.

But AI is not a replacement for your most important work: reflecting, thinking deeper about your current challenges, finding patterns, and asking big questions. AI cannot take the lead when it comes to developing your ideas. Because AI chatbots don’t have access to:

• your deep backlog of professional experience,
• mistakes you’ve made and learned from,
• lessons you’ve gleaned from mentors,
• dead ends you’ve found after wrong turns or failed experiments
• conversations you’ve had with clients,
• conferences you’ve attended,
• books you’ve read,
• themes you’ve seen emerging in your field,
• or those lightning bolt ideas that have come to you in the shower.

Your brain is full of all of those things, though! You have the power to access them, build on them, and weave them together.

But doing that work is hard. It requires slowing down, turning off email, carving out time for conversations and reflection, and, often, investing money. Developing your ideas requires a financial investment — in the form of your time, always, and often in paying a thought partner (either someone at your firm like a marketer or editor or an external thought partner like me) to spar with you to strengthen and test your ideas.

Woof. That sounds like a lot of work and investment. Wouldn’t it be easier to just see what kinds of ideas ChatGPT can drum up? It’ll just take a second…

AI thought leadership vs. human thought leadership

🧅Here’s an example. Let’s say you are a consultant who specializes in helping onion farmers transform their operations. You want to develop a new perspective to share in a talk at an upcoming conference, and to use as a flagship idea in your marketing over the next few months.

💡Option A: You could think like a thought leader, and…

— Catalog your expertise: What has your experience working with onion farmers for the last decade taught you? What best practices have you developed from that client work?

— Define your perspective: When you look at your body of work so far, what are the key pieces of advice you offer clients? How has your experience shaped the way you see the industry?

— Clarify your vision: What do you see coming next? What are your predictions for the future of the industry? Where do you think the industry should go? How should it change? How could your clients make different decisions today to create a different outcome tomorrow?

^^Side note: I know I’m in the right line of work because I would l-o-v-e to have this conversation with anyone in any field. I got excited just writing this list. 🤓So if you know any onion farmers who want to chat, send them my way. I’ll have a list of 50 questions prepared, plus follow-ups.

Having conversations to unearth the answers to those questions is important, deep, fascinating, reflective work. And it requires time! Thinking! Probably some money! But man, it’s so worth it to more clearly understand your own expertise, codify your unique perspective, and build a vision to lead you, your clients, and your business into the future. If you spent an hour talking through those themes, you’d leave the conversation with 10 ideas to explore at that onion-farming conference.

🤖Option B: What do the bots think?

OR! You could do what I see an *alarming*  number of smart, experienced people doing these days, and pull up your AI chatbot of choice.

You could prompt the bot with something like:

You’re an expert consultant for onion farmers. You’ve worked in the field for 25 years. What would you present at a conference for onion farmers in 2025? Please write the presentation title, summary, and key ideas.

And you could rejoice at the immediate response:

Presentation Title:
“Future-Proofing Onion Farming: Innovations, Challenges, and Market Strategies for 2025 and Beyond”

Summary:

The onion farming industry is evolving rapidly due to climate change, technological advancements, and shifting market demands. This presentation will provide onion farmers with cutting-edge insights into sustainable growing practices, pest and disease management, precision agriculture, and market trends. Attendees will gain actionable strategies to increase yields, reduce costs, and enhance profitability while ensuring environmental sustainability.

Key Ideas:

1. Climate-Resilient Onion Farming
   • Adapting to unpredictable weather patterns
   • Drought-resistant onion varieties
   • Efficient water management strategies
2. Advancements in Precision Agriculture
   • Using AI and IoT sensors for soil health monitoring
   • Drone technology for crop scouting and disease detection
   • Automated irrigation and fertilization systems
3. Sustainable Soil & Nutrient Management
   • Crop rotation and regenerative agriculture techniques
   • Organic vs. synthetic fertilizers: Best practices
   • Reducing soil degradation and improving long-term productivity
4. Pest & Disease Control in a Changing Environment
   • Integrated Pest Management (IPM) strategies
   • Emerging threats: How to combat new pests and diseases
   • Biological solutions vs. chemical treatments
5. Market Trends & Profitability Strategies
   • Meeting consumer demand for organic and specialty onions
   • Direct-to-consumer sales and value-added products
   • Understanding global trade dynamics and export opportunities
6. Post-Harvest Innovations & Storage Solutions
   • Improving shelf life and reducing losses
   • Smart storage technologies for humidity and temperature control
   • Sustainable packaging options for modern markets
7. Government Policies & Grants for Onion Farmers
   • Navigating agricultural subsidies and support programs
   • Understanding regulations for exports and organic certification
   • Advocating for farmer-friendly policies

This presentation will equip onion farmers with the tools and knowledge to thrive in an increasingly competitive and uncertain agricultural landscape. Through real-world examples and data-driven insights, farmers will leave with a clear roadmap to improve efficiency, sustainability, and profitability in 2025 and beyond.

Would you like me to expand on any of these topics?

—

When I read ChatGPT’s answer above, I’m nodding along. All of this sounds good. Sounds appropriate. Sounds like relevant ideas. This is a totally acceptable laundry list of issues onion farmers are probably facing.

But it’s also a conglomeration of everyone on the internet’s collective ideas about onion farming. It has *nothing* to do with you, your expertise, perspective, or vision. It’s a generic word salad that every other person at that conference can spin up in seconds, too.

Yeah, it’s cool that we have AI tools that can spit this stuff out in an instant. It feels almost magic. But here’s the thing: It’s not your magic power. Because it’s not yours.

The AI answer doesn’t have any of the specificity, context, personality, lessons learned, or creative ideas that you, a human who has worked in the industry for decades, could deliver. Why would you outsource the most human part of your work (the thinking!) to a tool that knows nothing about your thoughts?

The AI answer is also incredibly boring. Sure, you could keep prompting and asking more questions to get this answer to a more specific and interesting place. You could zoom in on one of the themes in this initial list. You could ask the bot to tell you the questions onion farmers are asking. It would give you an answer to all kinds of clarifying questions with absolute confidence. But what onion farmers does ChatGPT know? What random blog posts is it pulling its answers from? What is it just making up?

More importantly, what are you learning from this kind of conversation with an AI bot? Could you learn more if you talked to a human onion farmer about the challenges they’re facing? Could you learn more if you explain your recent work to a colleague? Could you learn more if an outsider asks you questions about the nuances of your work?

You sure would. And you’d be developing a very different outcome: not an AI-written, anonymized approximation of what any person’s expertise *might* be after working in that industry, but a real representation of you, your experiences, your perspective, your vision. Which you could share on a conference stage, in 1:1 conversations with clients, and in your marketing.

AI tools can be helpful. But they can’t do the hard work of looking deeply into your own body of work to understand what you think, why you think it, and what you see coming next.

Here’s my call to action: Developing your ideas is not a job to outsource to a computer. Let it fix your commas, sure. But do your deep thinking without AI dictating the conversation. AI might feel like an easy button, but it’s no substitute for the hard work of zooming in on your ideas, turning over new stones, asking yourself tough questions, and turning all that reflection into something worth spreading.