Your Brain Wasn't Built for This
The real reason leaders can't keep up. And what happened when 8 of them stopped trying to.
A week ago, I hosted 8 leaders around my dining table in Miami for the inaugural Rewired workshop. A full day of building AI workflows together. CEOs, nonprofit leaders, founders. The kind of people who run teams, set strategy, and have more ideas than hours.
It was the first time I’ve ever opened up my home like this, and that should tell you something about how important this work is to me.
We did not talk about AI theory. We opened laptops and went to work.
One attendee pulled in their customer data and within an hour had AI surfacing buying patterns they had never noticed. A specific subset of buyers, what those buyers were actually searching for, and the exact language they used. This person did not even know the industry term for that buyer segment before lunch. By the afternoon, we had rewritten their product page to match. A capability that did not exist for them 24 hours earlier.
Another attendee brought an Excel project that had been lingering for weeks. Done in minutes. Someone else built a website for their business from scratch. Another mapped out an enterprise AI rollout strategy. One person started planning a wedding. (Yes, really.)
But the thing I keep thinking about happened somewhere around 2 PM.
Almost everyone had walked in that morning typing everything. Fingers on keyboards, the way we have all worked for decades. And then, one by one, they started talking instead. Voice-first workflows. It felt weird at first. Awkward. Like the first time you leave a voice memo instead of typing a text. But then it clicked. People realized they were thinking out loud at the speed of thought instead of bottlenecking everything through their fingers. Three to five times faster. And it did not feel like effort. It felt like the tool had finally caught up to how their brains actually wanted to work.
That was the moment the room changed. Because this was not about learning a new app or memorizing a new set of commands. This was about the technology bending to fit the human, instead of the other way around.
Everyone at that table had walked in with the same feeling. I know I should be further along with this. By the end of the day, the weight was gone. And what replaced it was something I have been thinking about ever since.
I keep calling it brain relief.
Why Your Brain Is Full
Your brain has not meaningfully changed in 40,000 years. The prefrontal cortex you are using to read this newsletter is the same hardware your ancestors used to track elk across a frozen tundra. Neuroscientist Torkel Klingberg has spent years studying this exact problem. His conclusion: we are asking stone-age brains to do space-age work.
I recently shared a concept called The Campfire is Running Your Business that seemed to hit a raw nerve with many of you. It’s the idea that our 300,000-year-old brains are hardwired to react to the “loudest voice at the fire”…which today looks like a competitor’s splashy press release or a frantic Slack thread. We aren’t leading; we’re reacting to primal signals of urgency that don’t actually exist.
I have watched this play out in boardrooms for 17 years. A competitor makes a splashy announcement. The CEO gets rattled. Someone pulls up the press release and reads it out loud. By Friday the whole team has committed to a pivot nobody tested because the energy in the room felt like consensus. It was not consensus. It was the campfire. And it happens constantly.
The data confirms what most of us feel in our bodies. According to Microsoft’s 2025 Work Trend Index, the “space-age” workload has finally outpaced our “stone-age” hardware:
The Overwhelm: 68% of workers say they simply cannot keep up with the pace.
The Interruption Cycle: We are interrupted every two minutes, yet it takes an average of 23 minutes to refocus.
The Burnout Shift: Mental fatigue and cognitive strain have officially surpassed “too much work” as the leading cause of burnout.
Your brain literally cannot do what is being asked of it. We aren’t failing at our jobs; we are hitting a biological ceiling.
Deloitte’s 2025 Workforce Intelligence Report found something even more telling: mental fatigue and cognitive strain have now surpassed workload volume as the leading indicators of burnout. The problem is no longer how much we have to do. It is how our brains are being forced to do it.
Scott Barker lived this. A VC operator who co-founded one of the fastest-growing venture funds on the planet, Barker recently wrote about what he calls The Acceleration Decade. For ten years, he optimized his entire life for speed. Learned fintech, then software, then media, then venture capital. Climbed near the top of three industries. And then his body said no. Could not focus without a pill. Could not sleep without another one. Could not relax without a drink. He wrote about it on Substack and 200,000+ people read it in days. Because they saw themselves in every line.
Barker is right about what is happening. Where I want to go further is on what to do about it. Because every leader I work with is already trying hard. They are showing up, putting in the hours, reading the articles, attending the conferences. They just do not have a way to tell the difference between what actually deserves their attention and what is just the campfire being loud.
And this is where AI makes it complicated.
For most leaders, AI right now feels like one more thing piled on top of everything else. They sign up for a tool, watch a demo, try a prompt, get a mediocre result, and move on. Or they hand it off to someone junior and hope for the best. The guilt compounds. I should know more. I should be further along. I am falling behind.
Most people are approaching AI the same way they approach everything: as more work. Bolt it onto the same broken workflow. Wonder why nothing feels different.
McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI report confirms this at scale. 88% of organizations now use AI in at least one function. But 67% are still stuck in pilot mode. Only 39% see measurable profit impact. And of 25 organizational attributes McKinsey tested, the single biggest predictor of whether a company actually sees bottom-line results from AI is workflow redesign. Whether they fundamentally changed how the work gets done. Only 21% of companies have done that. The other 79% are layering AI on top of the old way. The companies seeing real results are three times more likely to have redesigned their workflows from the ground up.
The difference between those two groups is what I mean when I say working smarter. Designing your tools around how your brain already works instead of forcing your brain to adapt to one more interface.
Voice instead of typing.
Surfacing patterns from data instead of doing manual research.
Automated triage instead of inbox zero at midnight.
I watched this firsthand in my own house before I ever ran the workshop. Patrick, my husband, runs a mid-market e-commerce business in credentialing. A few weeks ago he came downstairs looking like he had found something. He had set up local AI models and pointed them at his pricing data across his entire catalog. Within hours, the system had flagged pricing errors and opportunities across hundreds of products. He looked at me and said, “This would have taken ten data scientists. I could never have afforded that.” The AI did not do his thinking for him. It cleared the noise so he could finally see what was in front of him.
That is what I keep coming back to. I have spent years building frameworks for spotting growth opportunities. Six categories of signals: customers, talent, leverage, money, culture, disruptions. Data points that, when you learn to read them, show you where the market is going before the headlines arrive. But this year taught me something I had been underestimating. The framework only works if you have the cognitive capacity to use it. And most leaders are so maxed out that they cannot see the signals even when the signals are sitting right in front of them on a spreadsheet.
The pace of information will not slow down. The volume will not shrink. This is our reality now. Maybe in five generations our biology catches up. But we are the ones who have to figure it out in the meantime.
We can keep white-knuckling it. Or we can rewire how we work so that our brains can do what they were actually built for. My Campfire article made this point and it resonated because people felt it: the Acceleration Decade does not need faster leaders. It needs more literate ones. People with a system for separating signal from noise and deciding what actually matters before reacting.
And that system, more and more, includes AI.
Back to the Dining Table
That is what I watched happen last Thursday.
Eight people walked into my home carrying the weight of everything I just described. They did not say “my biology is maxed out.” They said “I feel behind” and “I just cannot find the time.” Underneath it was the same thing. Their brains were full. Their nervous systems were spent. They had nothing left for the very thing that could help them.
By the end of the day, the room felt like a different place. People had built things that worked. They had felt what it is like when you stop forcing yourself into the machine’s way of doing things and let the machine adapt to you. When you talk instead of type and realize you were never slow. You were just using the wrong interface for a human brain.
One attendee texted me that night: “I was nonstop on my laptop from the moment I got in the car. I never do that. Got so much done.”
That text is what cognitive relief looks like. A 40,000-year-old brain that finally got the support it was never designed to have but desperately needs.
After the workshop, I could not stop thinking about how to give more people that same experience. Eight people at my dining table was incredible. But eight is eight. And, many asked for something remote.
I realized a one-hour webinar would only add to your noise. You don’t need another lecture; you need a redesigned architecture.
This is why I created the Rewired AI Mastermind.
This is the Next Step: Over four weeks, we move past the theory. You show up with your laptop, and you leave with a fully built AI system tailored to your actual business. No slides. No “homework.” Just live building.
We move beyond the 79% of companies that are just “bolting on” AI and move you into the 21% that fundamentally redesigns how they think. Over four weeks, we don’t just talk about tools. We build your specific “AI Brain.” You’ll move from typing to voice-first workflows and from manual data-drudgery to automated triage. We aren’t just adding a tool; we are installing the cognitive relief system your brain has been begging for since the “Acceleration Decade” began.
Week 1: Strategy & The Signal System
Week 2: Building Your AI Brain (The Knowledge Base)
Week 3: Your AI Chief of Staff (The Workflow)
Week 4: Multiplication & Scaling
The first cohort sold out in hours. This one is capped at 40 people to ensure I can personally make sure everyone succeeds.
You can see the three tiers and enroll here.
Our biology wasn’t built for this decade, but our tools finally are. Stop white-knuckling your way through the noise. It’s time to give your brain the partner it deserves.