Borrowed thinking
Why outsourcing our thinking has never been easier...or more dangerous
When I started my first marketing role, I had two 2-inch binders that contained just about every printable PDF I could get my hands on from Hubspot, Seth Godin, the Content Marketing Institute, Rand Fishkin’s content for Moz, and various other sources. I was an absolute sponge + wanted to learn as much as I could from people who’ve already “solved” the problems I’d be coming up against in my career ahead.
To this day, I think it was one of the most impactful things I did early on as it helped cement a growth mindset into me
…but for all the good that it did, I think it also instilled something in me that took about a decade in marketing to realize was doing me more harm than good:
I was treating all of the answers + playbooks I’d learned from others as dogma without questioning if they were truly the best things to be using in the various scenarios I encountered each day as a marketer.
And now as I’m having fun building Affect on the side, that lesson is hitting me harder than ever.
All of the answers + playbooks out there, while directionally correct, can’t be applied literally for Affect. How I build + define my ICP, the specific messaging I use across various assets, how the product is priced, even how I’ve configured the P&L all require me to stop + think through what elements apply to my situation and which simply won’t work due to any number of reasons.
As I’m going through all of this, I’m seeing this lesson everywhere now. After reflecting on all the books I've read and took notes on over the years + various podcast episodes I’ve saved, I’m seeing that this has been pointed out by authors, founders, leaders, and thinkers MUCH smarter than I am for hundreds thousands of years.
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Borrowed thinking
We’re seeing a TON of this right now with the rise of AI + LLMs.
All of the written-by-LLM giveaways in posts + comments. All of the analyses delivered to us at work with the same LLM formatting + hallucinations/inaccuracies that any individual working at a company would never include. All of the same new growth plays being used by hundreds of companies.
But borrowed thinking isn’t new or unique to this point in time. The binders I mentioned in the first sentence of this essay prove that + every comment-gated post we see today on LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, etc. show this is being done in other ways today as well.
The thing that’s changed is that the effort required to go about this now is near zero. When I was printing off those PDFs early in my career, I had to do research to find the relevant content + credible sources and then skim through to determine if they were going to be applicable for me (or at least something I could learn from + use later). There was some thinking required to get to the borrowed answer.
That’s gone now. And this isn’t exclusive to early-career marketers either. I’ve seen it from individuals at every level of an organization - demand gen specialists running ICP analyses to directors of product marketing doing competitive intel to CEOs building out business plans.
There’s a really interesting psychological element at play here too. There’s a sense of pride in the LLM’s output + wanting to share it with others - “Look at this incredible output that I was able to guide [insert any LLM here] to!” As if the length of the output warrants a gold star since something of that length previously would’ve taken weeks to pull together.
So while we have the person who generated this output thinking they just solved world hunger, the person/people they’re sending it to are thinking, “Great, another 30-page AI analysis that I’m going to have to sift through while trying not to write it off as soon as I come across the second inaccuracy I see that any team member would never make.”
The output looks good - the formatting, structure, etc. all visually looks good, but the more we dig in and go one or two levels deeper into something, the house of cards it’s built on falls apart.
And herein lies the problem with borrowed thinking: the person who’s doing the borrowing never had a proper “conversation” with the thinking they borrowed. They took it at face value + applied it with zero modifications to their circumstances. So not only do you end up with a strategy or direction that, while the overall heading may be right, the actual path is the wrong one + leads somewhere else entirely.
”In a world where anyone can look up information online, it’s deceptively easy to gain ‘knowledge.’ You can get pretty confident by reading everything you can get your hands on about a certain subject, it’s called ‘artificial maturity.’ But knowing about how to do something and having practical experience actually doing something are radically different.”
- Chop Wood Carry Water, by Joshua Medcalf
What makes this even more dangerous is that it creates a “confidence” gap that’s completely invisible to the generator. The more polished the output looks or sounds, the more convinced the generator is that the thinking underneath it is perfect.
To use Joshua Medcalf’s term above, this is “artificial maturity” at scale. We have individuals or entire companies that are now able to present the appearance of strategic thinking + execution through their analyses + frameworks, but haven’t actually done the work of understanding what fed those. The ironic (and slightly terrifying) thing about this is that the recipients of all of these outputs aren’t being fooled, as they can see through it - it’s that it fools the people generating it into thinking they have a true understanding of what they’re creating.
“Learning does not make one learned: there are those who have knowledge and those who have understanding. The first requires memory, the second philosophy.”
- The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas
The cost of not being forced to think
Following a playbook works great…until it stops working.
The ironic part of this is that when the playbook stops working, or its efficacy starts to diminish, the playbook still isn’t questioned. We immediately jump to the execution of it as the most likely culprit + dump more resources into it such as more budget or more hours worked on it. Or worse, we might do something like go look for someone who’s “better” at running the playbook, or find the latest + greatest tool that “optimizes” it for us.
It couldn’t possibly be the playbook that’s the problem because it’s THE playbook. It’s our holy grail - it came from Hubspot + has been working for all these years after all.
“You gotta challenge all assumptions. If you don’t, what is doctrine on day one becomes dogma forever after.”
- Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, by Robert Coram
This is what Boyd was speaking to in the above quote, that we need to be constantly revisiting whether the playbook/strategy/etc. we’ve adopted still applies. If you or your team ever finds yourself defending something + when pushed for why, you aren’t sure of the initial why the decision was made to go in this direction or who even made the decision - that’s a troubling sign.
”One reason was that rocket components were subject to hundreds of specifications and requirements mandated by the military and NASA. At big aerospace companies, engineers followed these religiously. Musk did the opposite: he made his engineers question all specifications. This would later become step one in a five-point checklist, dubbed “the algorithm,” that became his oft-repeated mantra when developing products. Whenever one of his engineers cited “a requirement” as a reason for doing something, Musk would grill them: Who made that requirement? And answering “The military” or “The legal department” was not good enough. Musk would insist that they know the name of the actual person who made the requirement. “We would talk about how we were going to qualify an engine or certify a fuel tank, and he would ask, ‘Why do we have to do that?’” says Tim Buzza, a refugee from Boeing who would become SpaceX’s vice president of launch and testing. “And we would say, ‘There is a military specification that says it’s a requirement.’ And he’d reply, ‘Who wrote that? Why does it makes sense?’” All requirements should be treated as recommendations, he repeatedly instructed. The only immutable ones were those decreed by the laws of physics.”
- Elon Musk, by Walter Isaacson
Then on the other side of this, you have countless examples from history of companies + individuals who failed to adapt because their previous success had them holding onto their dogmatic playbook for far too long. We see this all the time in huge companies, the ones that almost seem too big to fail, and it proves that it has nothing to do with a lack of resources.
”The person who is the star of a previous era is often the last one to adapt to change, the last one to yield to the logic of a strategic inflection point and tends to fall harder than most.”
- Only the Paranoid Survive, by Andy Grove
We see this in marketing often as well. The CMO who rose through the ranks early in their career running the predictable revenue (lead gen) model and doesn’t come to terms with an ever-growing CAC payback period. The demand gen manager who has hit their goals over the years from a strong, high-volume email marketing program, but is finding the changes over the past year to email deliverability is drastically decreasing pipeline production from this channel, so they decide to send more emails.
No one is making bad decisions with ill intent here, they’re just doing what they think makes sense based on what they know. And this is where the cracks start to show to understand if we ever really understood what we were doing or if we were simply borrowing someone else’s thinking to get by.
”Never take it for granted that your past successes will continue into the future. Actually, your past successes are your biggest obstacle: every battle, every war, is different, and you cannot assume that what worked before will work today.”
- The 33 Strategies of War, by Robert Greene
Back to zero
A few years into my career, I was sitting in a quarterly business review + watched something I’ve never forgotten.
Sales leadership stood up first + said they missed their revenue target. The team was working hard but the results weren’t there. Then marketing leadership stood up + said they had another strong quarter. We surpassed the MQL target yet again.
And then nobody said a damn word.
Nobody questioned how both of those things could be true at the same time. They just moved on, acting like this was completely normal. Because to everyone else in that room, it was.
That room is what eventually led me to build Affect. And one thing building Affect has taught me that I’ve come to appreciate is that when you’re starting from scratch, you have the choice to either borrow the thinking (playbooks + strategies) of others, or to go back to first principles + think through everything yourself.
“His years in the jungle gave him experience rare in the trade. Unlike most of his competitors, he understood every part of the business, from the executive suite where the stock was manipulated to the ripening room where the green fruit turned yellow. He was contemptuous of banana men who spent their lives in the North, far from the plantations. Those schmucks, what do they know? They’re there, we’re here!”
- The Fish That Ate the Whale, by Rich Cohen
In the passage above, this was something Samuel Zemurray recognized immediately as he built Cuyamel Fruit Company into the behemoth that it became, overtaking long-time market leader United Fruit Company with this mentality. That by having been in the jungle seeing where the bananas grew, understanding how the local governments worked, experiencing the transportation methods available to them, he was able to uncover opportunities that would become his unique competitive advantages. He opted not to follow the existing “playbook” for the banana industry and reshaped it in his favor to meet the modern world.
”The easiest, most straightforward way to create a great product or service is to make something you want to use. That lets you design what you know - and you’ll figure out immediately whether or not what you’re making is any good…
When you build a product or service, you make the call on hundreds of tiny decisions each day. If you’re solving someone else’s problem, you’re constantly stabbing in the dark. When you solve your own problem, the light comes on. You know exactly what the right answer is.
Best of all, this “solve your own problem” approach lets you fall in love with what you’re making. You know the problem and the value of its solution intimately. There’s no substitute for that. After all, you’ll (hopefully) be working on this for years to come. Maybe even the rest of your life. It better be something you really care about.”
- Rework, by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson
After sitting in that QBR years ago + seeing variations of it play out over my career, this all led me to the creation of Affect. Or to the point made in Rework above, creating a product that I wanted to use because I was my own ICP. I’d immediately be able to recognize if the strategy + playbook were working because the feedback loop is near instant. I think > I build > I ship > I use > I ask.
“Whoever can handle the quickest rate of change is the one who survives.”
- Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, by Robert Coram
Same problem, new clothes
I said it a few weeks ago + I’ll say it again: we come across the same problems all the time, they just put on different clothes each time they show up.
This became even more clear to me while pulling together this week’s essay as all of the various authors, founders, leaders, + thinkers who came to this same conclusion have done so from entirely different domains, era, and situations. When you have individuals such as a stoic emperor, a fighter pilot, a banana man, a manufacturing consultant, and a fiction writer all arriving at the same place, you know there’s truth there.
Borrowed thinking is far from a modern problem + it’s not a “problem” in any sense, it’s simply part of the human experience. As Robert Greene put it:
”The world is full of people looking for a secret formula for success and power. They do not want to think on their own; they just want a recipe to follow…They want these steps spelled out for them by an expert or a guru. Believing in the power of imitation, they want to know exactly what some great person has done before.”
- The 33 Strategies of War, by Robert Greene
But the underlying problem with this is, to continue Robert Greene’s analogy, when the recipe is followed without understanding why a certain amount of an ingredient is used, or why one type of flour is used instead of another, that while the recipe is then known to us, it’s not understood by us. As John Graham shared:
"Some men learn all they know from books; others from life; both kinds are narrow. The first are all theory; the second are all practice. It's the fellow who knows enough about practice to test his theories for blow-holes that gives the world a shove ahead, and finds a fair margin of profit in shoving it."
- Letters from a Self-Made Merchant, John Graham
The fun in writing this essay here is that I get to look back on the past 15 years + see this all laid out on a timeline. The two 2-inch binders I filled in that first year of my marketing career with “borrowed thinking” gave me theory. All of the years since then have given me practice. As I’m now building Affect, I’m watching years of theory + years of practice finally come together to devise the strategy for bringing it to life + create my own unique playbook for the stage it’s currently at.
Reflecting on the hundreds of companies I’ve analyzed or helped over the years, and then the countless other companies I’ve watched from the outside, I’m realizing this is the work that most of us are guilty of taking shortcuts on. We could do the analyses, the hours of research, the brainstorming of messaging + positioning, etc., but when there’s thinking sitting right in front of us that’s ready to be borrowed and is close enough…well, it’s hard not to use it.
And Ayn Rand put it in words you feel deep in your bones because of the blunt truth it holds:
“The vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.”
- Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
AI didn’t create this problem as it’s been around for centuries. What it has done is make the subordination described above by Rand frictionless. It’s never been easier to borrow thinking - it’s literally just a single prompt away.
I’d love to jump on my high horse and say I’ve never done this, but as I’ve been building Affect, it forces me to confront that choice daily as there's always a prompt response or a LinkedIn playbook that's close enough. But close enough is how we end up running the same strategy as everyone else + then wonder why we aren’t getting differentiated results or building moats from the competition. None of the people I've cited in this essay achieved the results they did by taking the close enough option. They got there by doing the harder thing - questioning every assumption, going back to first principles, + executing in a way that was authentic to them.
See you next Saturday,
Sam