If AI is making you faster, it might also be making you wrong faster.
Most people talk about AI like it’s a racecar. Faster emails, faster launches, faster “productivity.” But speed is not the issue. Direction is.
If you are heading toward the wrong destination, speed just guarantees you will get lost faster. AI is like strapping a rocket to the wrong vehicle.
The real power of AI is not velocity. It is clarity, the kind that forces you to see the terrain before you put your foot on the gas.
The Psychology of Chasing Speed
Humans love speed because it feels like progress. Checking things off the list, shipping something quickly, and hitting “done” all give you a dopamine hit.
But that hit can blind you.
Cognitive psychology calls this action bias. When faced with uncertainty, we would rather do something, anything, than pause to think. It feels safer, but that action often locks us deeper into the wrong path.
AI supercharges this bias. It makes it so easy to create, produce, and launch that you can trick yourself into thinking motion equals momentum.
The Map Is Not the Territory
Alfred Korzybski’s old idea still holds: the map is not the territory. AI outputs are maps, interpretations, models, and possibilities, but they are not reality.
Treat them as reality, and you will make confident, wrong decisions at scale.
Treat them as maps, and you can compare, adjust, and choose the correct route.
This is where AI becomes a clarity engine instead of just a productivity tool.
How AI Sharpens Thinking
When you use it deliberately, AI can help you:
Stress-Test Your Assumptions
Before committing resources, have AI poke holes in your reasoning and highlight where you might be wrong.Spot Blind Spots
Use AI to uncover what your biases are hiding. Look for perspectives or risks you have overlooked.Synthesize Complexity
Collapse multiple competing perspectives and datasets into a coherent picture you can act on.
These are not just tactics. They are a way to slow down just long enough to get the direction right.
The Inversion Model: Clarity Before Speed
This is where the mental model of Inversion comes in.
Instead of asking, “How can I use AI to move faster?” ask, “How could using AI cause me to fail faster?”
List those failure points. They might include acting on incorrect data, overestimating your certainty, or automating the wrong process. Then use AI to help remove those risks before you even think about acceleration.
AI’s real advantage is not in giving you more horsepower. It is in showing you where the road is washed out before you floor it.
Clarity Creates Speed—the Right Kind.
Here is the paradox: once you use AI for clarity, speed happens naturally.
When you know exactly what matters, you stop wasting cycles on the irrelevant.
You launch faster because you avoided building the wrong thing.
Your message lands harder because you tested it against reality before sending it.
This is not about working more hours or producing more output. It is about collapsing the time between idea and confident action.
The Shift That Matters
Most people are stuck in “prompt and pray” mode, throwing vague instructions into AI and hoping magic happens.
The leaders who win will use AI to:
Define the problem with surgical precision
Stress-test ideas against multiple scenarios
Align every action with a clear, long-term strategy
They will not just move fast. They will move fast in the right direction.
If you treat AI like a racecar, you will obsess over speed. If you treat it like a compass, you will start asking: Where should I go?
In business and life, the person with the clearest destination will always outrun the one with the fastest engine.