Unthink

Ben Franklin probably had a British accent.

His father was born in England. All four grandparents were born in England. Franklin himself spent years living in London. But when you picture him - the bifocals, the kite, the hundred-dollar bill - your brain gives him an American accent. Obviously.

Except it’s wrong. And even after you know it’s wrong, it still feels wrong. That’s the grip of what you already “know.” Your brain would rather hold the comfortable assumption than accept the obvious truth.

That’s the wall most people are hitting with AI right now. Not access. Not cost. Not capability. The wall is what they already think they know - about their job, their workflow, their industry, their expertise.

The beginner’s mind is a real concept in Zen philosophy. Children have it naturally. Adults almost never do. Babies fall constantly when learning to walk because they don’t know they’re supposed to be afraid of falling. Adults won’t even take the first step.

I met a kid recently. Just out of college, working in investment banking. He told me his bank doesn’t allow them to use AI for their work. Then he told me he believed it would be at least six years before AI meaningfully impacted what he does.

SIX YEARS. Someone is telling him that. WTF.

I told him to go home and unthink everything he’d been told. Take the kind of analysis he’s building - industry valuations, financial modeling - and tell Claude to generate sample data in that style. Do the job at home. Have Claude do it in parallel. Compare the outcomes. Tailor the prompts. Start finding natural breakpoints in the workflow where AI could compress hours into minutes. Then build software around those breakpoints - tools that reshape how the analysis gets done, not just how fast.

He doesn’t have to fight his leadership. He must be ready when the hammer drops. And when AI shows up at that bank - and it will - he’ll be miraculously ahead of everyone who waited for permission.

But first, he must unlearn what he’s been taught. And that’s the hardest part.

We train people to follow process. To replicate what works. To do what they’re told the way they were trained to do it. But acolyting your way through a career is the opposite of beginner’s mind. It calcifies exactly the thinking you need to shed.

Over the last seven weeks I’ve written about walls, building with your own hands, premature celebrations, the K-Curve, holding AI to impossible standards, and building new spikes of expertise. All of that requires one thing first.

You have to unthink before you can rethink.

The cost of failure has never been lower. You can experiment at home tonight for free. Nobody’s watching. Nothing breaks. The only thing at risk is a belief that was already wrong.

Ben Franklin had a British accent. Now unthink something that actually matters.