Working harder is not the lever anymore

There is a moment you eventually hit where you realise something uncomfortable.

Working harder is not the thing that moves you ahead anymore.

It is still required. It is just not the advantage.

The advantage now is leverage. Leverage is a mix of critical and strategic thinking, repeatable systems and AI.

If your plan is to outwork people who have leverage, you are going to lose. Not because you are lazy. Because you are fighting a multiplier with only effort.

Hard work is table stakes

I do not disrespect hard work. I respect it a lot.

But hard work used to be the moat. It used to be the differentiator. It used to be the thing you could rely on when you did not have the best tools, the best network or the best starting point.

AI is changing that.

People who can think clearly and use these tools well will ship faster, learn faster, and iterate faster.

You cannot catch that with hours.

If you do one thing this week

Stop consuming AI content and start building AI leverage.

You do not need a bootcamp. You do not need 200 threads. You need reps.

Pick one real task you already do and wrap AI around it. Make it repeatable.

If you do that once, you get a small win.

If you do it every week, you get compounding.

What it looks like in practice

Most people are still using AI for meeting notes and replacing Google search.

That is fine, but it is entry-level.

Here are two examples that feel closer to real leverage.

Turn a vague initiative into an execution machine

Say you have a fuzzy goal like: "ship feature X this month".

A leveraged workflow looks like:

ask AI to turn the goal into a plan with milestones, risks, and measurable success criteria
ask it to generate a PRD outline and a technical design doc you can actually critique
have it list the highest-risk unknowns and propose quick experiments to de-risk them
have it create a test plan and a rollout plan, including monitoring and rollback
use it as a reviewer that tries to break your approach and find edge cases you missed

The point is not that AI writes the docs.

The point is that AI turns 'maybe I should do this' into a solid first draft and a clear plan in minutes.

Build a lightweight life ops system

Instead of asking for a meal plan once, build a loop:

set constraints once (time, calories, family preferences, budget)
generate 5 dinners
keep a short log of what actually got cooked and what got skipped
ask AI to adjust next week based on reality

While you are at it, increase the leverage:

Set it up to run weekly automatically
Ask it to create a shopping list at the same time

What about the power users? Well there are no limits:

Set up some AI assistant to actually buy the shopping and get it delivered directly to your door
Set up some ad hoc workflow where you can just ping a chat and auto add or adjust your preferences or timings.

If you are interested in the power user workflow, check out OpenClaw

That is the pattern. You do not just get an answer. You build a system that compounds over time.

Do not get tricked by the anti-hype

People love saying AI is a bubble, useless, overhyped.

Sure, some tools will die. Prices will change. Models will regress.

But the direction is obvious. This is not going away.

If you care about being competitive, employable, and ahead of the curve, you have to get fluent. Not in theory. In practice.

A simple 7-day challenge

If you want something concrete:

Day 1: pick one task you do weekly
Day 2: get AI to draft a workflow for it
Day 3: run it for real
Day 4: automate one step
Day 5: write down what worked, what didn't and feed that back to AI
Day 6: run it again
Day 7: pick a second task

Hard work still matters.

But leverage is the new gap.