14 hours without Wi-Fi

On October 1st last year, Lisi and I pulled into Olympic National Park in Washington. There was no service or Wi-Fi, and the trees were too thick for our Starlink to get a clear view of the sky.

I wrote this by hand in my journal that morning:

It's a good experiment to try to wean off constant connectivity, as strange as it feels and as twitchy as I get from time to time.

It shows how reliant the modern human is on the internet—"Connectivity" without any real connection.

A few lines later:

Embracing and sitting with boredom feels foreign, even though I vividly remember living in Romania 25 years ago, when doing nothing would have been perfectly suitable.

This wasn't the first time.

When I was actively selling and traveling often, I'd get on a plane, open the laptop, and find that everything I needed lived in the cloud. One time, I was working on a major deal with Chipotle, and I had a long flight to California to prepare something in Google Slides, but the GoGo Inflight Wi-Fi wasn’t working. That was 5 hours of productive time I had planned, gone because I couldn’t connect to the internet.

I put the journal away and mostly forgot about these brief moments without connection to the outside world.

As you may know, I’ve been working hard to bring a book to life. I’m in the editing phase, and to get some inspiration, Lisi and I wanted to head to the mountains (plus, it’s been hot as hell in Nashville, so we needed some cooler weather too).

We spent a week in Highlands, North Carolina, visiting Lisi’s parents and hanging out with her sister who flew down from New York. After that, we headed into the Smoky Mountains. It was a near repeat of the previous year—a beautiful campsite, tons of trees, and no connection to the outside world.

It was only two days, but when I got reconnected at our next stop, I reread the rainforest journal entry and found something that stood out:

Even continuing to write the first draft of my book in offline mode still requires an online connection to pull in some of my past writing or to collaborate with AI.

A year ago I wrote that down as a small annoyance. The Wi-Fi was the problem. This time the Wi-Fi wasn't what I missed. It was my sparring sessions with AI.

While I was thinking about all of this, three things crossed my social feed in the short time I got reconnected to Wi-Fi so I could prepare to write this.

The first was TIME's AI dinner in San Francisco, where Joseph Gordon-Levitt stood up and said, "Today's AI companies are operating in such a way that the law should be shutting them down."

Brad Stulberg, whose work on human performance I've followed for years, posted: "Reject AI slop. F*ck the machine. Be ultra-human."

And then, Dale Dupree shared an image that's been going around. It asks anyone who wants AI slowed down one thing: "Could you still get through an entire workday without ChatGPT, Claude, or any other AI tool?"

One commenter, a CEO, answered: "It's pretty scary to think people couldn't function without it now."

If you only read the feed, you'd think everyone has picked a side.

Then Dale quoted Gallup. I checked the numbers. At the end of last year, 12% of U.S. workers used AI every day. 26% used it a few times a week or more. 49% never used it at work at all.

Underneath "F*ck the machine," Brad wrote this: "This doesn't mean you should never take the gondola. (I have.) But you shouldn't always take the gondola. And you certainly shouldn't take the gondola for your most important mountains."

I agree with him. I also can't sign off on everything on his recent list. His September list of 33 side quests “that make you feel alive” includes #28: "Do not use AI for creative work." Last Friday I sent you a full strategic teardown and told you how I made it: 90 minutes, with Claude. I architected. Claude proposed. I refined.

So I'm not going to pretend I'm in his camp (no AI for creative work). I'm not in the other camp either (AI only).

That question in the image above from Dale’s post (“could you get through an entire day without AI?”) only measures whether you'd be slower. Of course you'd be slower.

I think there’s a better set of questions to ask:

Could I still do this without it, only slower?

Then it's a partner.

Could I not do it at all?

Then it isn't my skill anymore. I'm leasing my best assets.

The teardown I built passes this filter. I ran a similar play, only manually instead of with AI assistance, for each one of the nine mega deals I closed at LivePerson over my four-year tenure there.

I would study what my prospects' CEOs were saying, write the article outlining the transformation first, and then map the executives. It used to take me weeks. Last week, my work with Claude took it down to 90 minutes (and it was better). If Claude disappeared tomorrow, I'd go back to weeks, but here’s the kicker … the work would still be mine.

What made it easier and faster was that I’d been training AI on my body of work. I was able to feed it with my past transcripts, deal wins, and an approach I could call my own. If you’ve been in sales long enough and have hit your number more times than not, you have all of these assets waiting to be leveraged too. They just might not be organized yet.

Last month I wrote that a skill is something you have and a capability is something you own. In the book, I call the opposite of that the Leased Life—when your income, identity, and opportunities are real, but all of it is borrowed from your employer. It disappears the day someone else decides your fate.

I wrote that about sellers. It turns out you can lease your thinking the same way, one small handoff at a time, and not even notice.

I keep coming back to three words, in a specific order. Human first. Professional second. AI third.

Human first means I know what fills my batteries and what drains them, and I take care of that before anything else. Professional second means I want a standard of work I can stand behind, and I've paid the tax to reach it myself. AI comes third, after those two are full, and only if it serves them.

The times off the grid reminded me of the first one. Lisi was right there. So was a real book. So was a pen.

The answer isn't to log off completely. It’s just to remember the right order, and that always starts with you as the human first.

Brad's list for September is worth exploring. I was able to do some it and am better off for it:

Here's one more I'd add:

Pick the piece of work you're proudest of so far this year. It could be an account narrative, a pre-call email, or the creative outreach that landed a meeting. Tomorrow morning, turn the Wi-Fi off for 90 minutes and do a new version by hand for a new account. No AI. No internet. Just a pen and paper.

If it comes out slower but still yours, good. From there, you can run it through AI on Monday and see how/if it improves. If it doesn't come out well, that's the most useful thing you'll learn this month.

I ended that journal entry with a question I never answered: "Where do you go when the noise kicks in, or the boredom appears?"

Now I go within, breathe calmly, and find clarity there. I find my inspiration in the peace inside, not in the noise outside. That’s valuable leverage that will stick with me for a long time.

Stay human, friends.