The new one is built around deploying intelligence.

That’s the shift. And most people haven’t caught it yet.

The old model is dead

For fifty years, one model ran the business world. Didn’t matter what industry. Didn’t matter how good your idea was. To build something real, you needed capital, technical knowledge, a team, speed to market, and credentials.

If you had all five, you could build. If you were missing one, you were stuck. Most people were missing at least two.

The system looked like a meritocracy. It wasn’t. It was a gatekeeping system posing as a meritocracy. The person with the best solution to a real problem could spend years stuck at the gate while someone with worse ideas and better connections walked straight through.

That model just broke. Not gradually. Not over a decade. In the span of months.

Five hard barriers lost their leverage all at once:

Capital. A $200/month plan gives you infrastructure that would have cost $50,000/year per developer five years ago. You don’t need a runway. You need a weekend.

Technical knowledge. Plain English is the new code. You describe the outcome. The agent figures out the steps. The barrier isn’t technical anymore. It’s the willingness to describe what you want clearly.

Team size. Agents are the new employees. One person can now run what required a five-person team two years ago. One agent monitors leads. Another follows up. Another creates content. Another tracks performance. The operator makes decisions. The agents execute. Headcount stays at one.

Time to market. 48 hours from idea to running business. Not perfect. Not polished. But operational. Generating feedback. Iterating in real time. The window between idea and execution is measured in hours. Not months.

Credentials. Results replace resumes. A 22-year-old who can deploy an agentic business system that generates real revenue doesn’t need a degree. The output IS the credential.

The playing field didn’t just tilt. It flattened.

Infrastructure out, intelligence in

Before, you competed on what you could build and maintain. Offices. Teams. Software stacks. Vendor relationships. The business WAS the infrastructure. And building it cost money, time, and headcount before you ever served a single customer.

Now you compete on what you can direct and orchestrate.

A business model at its core answers three questions. How do you create value? How do you deliver it? How do you capture it?

Under the old model, all three required human infrastructure. You needed people to create, people to deliver, and systems built by people to capture. That was the game for half a century.

AI doesn’t just make that infrastructure cheaper. It makes it instant and autonomous. You can now create, deliver, and capture value with agents running the operations. Before you have a team. Before you have funding. Before you’ve proven anything.

The CEO of a one-person company running ten agents isn’t managing people. They’re directing outcomes.

That’s a fundamentally different game.

3 levels, most people are at level 1

Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn, put it plainly. We’re at maybe 5% of what AI will become. And even most people who SAY they’re using AI aren’t using it seriously enough.

He laid out three levels that stuck with me.

The first is daily conversation with AI. Not casual. Not occasional. You’re using it to think through real decisions, pressure-test strategy, analyze options. Most people aren’t even doing THIS consistently. Table stakes, and most of us are still reaching for the chips.

The second is persistent agents with assigned roles. You’re not running one-off requests anymore. You have AI agents operating as ongoing infrastructure. One knows your content strategy. One tracks your pipeline. One monitors your market. They’re not tools you open and close. They run continuously. This is where serious operators are heading. Very few have arrived.

The third is meta-intelligence. One agent synthesizing everything the others produce. Cross-referencing your internal performance data with external signals. Surfacing patterns you’d never spot manually. Generating insight across every business function simultaneously at the cost of electricity.

The operator running at level three isn’t just more efficient. They’re seeing their business from a fundamentally different altitude than everyone else in the room.

Here’s the honest question most operators avoid. Where am I ACTUALLY? Not where I think I am. Not where I aspire to be. Where I am today. And what does the next move look like?

The gap is the opportunity

The data backs up the urgency.

Anthropic published a labor market report in March 2026 that measured the gap between what AI can theoretically do and what people are actually using it for.

Theoretical capability and observed exposure by occupational category
Share of job tasks that LLMs could theoretically perform (blue area) and our own job coverage measure derived from usage data (red area).

AI is capable of performing tasks across 94% of roles in Computer and Math. Actual observed usage? 33%.

The gap between capability and deployment is enormous. And that gap is the opportunity.

Not in some future capability that doesn’t exist yet. In what’s ALREADY possible and what most businesses are doing with it today. That distance is where the reset lives.

Who actually gets the key

This isn’t a story about tech people getting richer. It’s about everyone who was locked out finally getting a key.

The person with 20 years of niche expertise who could never afford to productize it. That person can now build the product they’ve been describing at dinner parties for a decade.

The small business owner who couldn’t compete with enterprise tools. AI agents don’t charge per seat. They don’t require implementation consultants. They don’t need a six-month onboarding process.

The operator in a market where nobody is using AI yet. Right now, in almost every industry outside of tech, the AI adoption curve is nearly flat. The person who walks into their local market and deploys AI solutions has almost no competition.

The person who was always told “you need more before you can start.” More money. More experience. More connections. AI doesn’t care about any of that. It cares about one thing: can you describe what you want clearly enough for an agent to execute it?

If you can explain your idea, you can build it. That’s not a tagline. That’s the new rule.

The window

Every technology shift has a window.

The internet had one. The people who moved in 1995 built the platforms that still dominate today. The people who moved in 2010 found a crowded market. The people who moved in 2020 are still paying subscription fees to the companies that moved first.

Compounding works in both directions. Early adopters compound advantage. Late adopters compound disadvantage.

The person who builds the system today owns the client relationship. The person who shows up in two years is the commodity vendor.

This window is open right now. And it’s measured in months, not years.

The only question that matters

Stop asking “is this real.” The evidence is in.

Stop asking “am I technical enough.” You need to be able to describe what you want. That’s it.

There’s one question that actually matters.

Are you willing to adopt and create?

My advice to operators still on the fence: it’s time to completely rethink your business model from the inside out. Every area. Just start. It will be messy at first but the more you learn and experiment, the faster you’ll see the cracks. Then, rebuild.

Willing to adopt means you’ll spend a few days learning the tools. Run your first agent. Break things. Learn. Run it again.

Willing to create means you’ll ship something before it’s perfect. You’ll put a real product in front of a real customer before you feel ready.

That combination is the only competitive advantage that matters right now. Not capital. Not credentials. Not connections.

The people who win the next decade are already building. Some of them started last week.

It’s time to get busy building my friends. Over to you. 🫡

Dr. Anna Lembke’s research in Dopamine Nation breaks down the five characteristics that make anything addictive. And while she’s talking about romance novels and gambling, the underlying neuroscience applies to why people check their email 50 times a day, why they can’t stop scrolling TikTok, and why they’ll pay $8 for coffee at Starbucks when Dunkin’ is cheaper.

Here’s the framework and how to apply it to your brand. If you serve B2B or B2C markets, it’s all the same. Humans are humans and these techniques will transform your products, services and experiences into a magnetic brand of choice.

1. Access

Dr. Lembke’s own addiction started with teenage romance novels. She controlled her habit just fine when she had to walk to the library. Then she got a Kindle and it was all downhill from there.

Why: The brain rewires itself based on how frequently we consume something. Easy access = frequent consumption = stronger neural pathways = habit formation.

How businesses screw this up: They make people create accounts, fill out forms, download apps, verify emails, wait for approval, and jump through twelve other hoops before they can get value.

How to do it right:

• Amazon: One-click purchasing. They patented removing friction.

• Netflix: No commercials, no waiting, auto-play the next episode before you can think about stopping.

• Uber: You’re literally three taps away from a car arriving at your location. Compare that to calling a cab company in 2008.

• Your business: What’s the fastest path from “I want this” to “I have this”? Every extra step is costing you customers and weakening the habit loop.

Do this: Map your customer journey. Count the clicks, forms, and decision points. Then cut half of them. If your competitor can deliver the same value in fewer steps, you’re training customers to go to them instead.

2. Quantity

Dr. Lembke’s Kindle didn’t just give her easy access, it gave her an infinite universe of content.

Why: The more we use something, the deeper into dopamine deficit we go, which drives the addiction cycle. Abundance creates opportunity for that cycle to accelerate.

How businesses screw this up: They ration their best content, limit access to features, or make people wait for the next release. You’re trying to create scarcity when you should be creating abundance.

How to do it right:

• Spotify: 100 million songs. You could listen 24/7 for multiple lifetimes and never run out.

• YouTube: 500 hours of content uploaded every minute. The platform never sleeps, never runs dry.

• Notion: Infinite pages, infinite databases, infinite possibilities. The more you build in it, the harder it becomes to leave.

• Your business: How much value can someone extract before they hit a wall? If there’s a ceiling, they’ll eventually leave. If there’s infinite depth, they’ll keep digging.

Do this: Look at your product limitations. Are they protecting your business model, or are they just limiting how deeply customers can integrate you into their lives? Sometimes giving away more creates more loyalty than holding back ever could.

3. Potency

Dr. Lembke went from teenage vampire romance novels to graphic sadomasochistic content she wasn’t even naturally drawn to. Not all at once. She gradually craved more.

Why: The brain adapts to repeated dopamine hits. What worked yesterday stops working today. Users need progressively stronger experiences to feel the same satisfaction.

How businesses screw this up: They deliver the same experience at the same intensity forever, wondering why engagement drops over time.

How to do it right:

• Social media platforms: They’ve mastered this. Every algorithm update makes the feed more engaging, more personalized, more impossible to look away from.

• Video games: Tutorial levels → boss battles → multiplayer competition → ranked leagues → esports. Each level increases intensity.

• SaaS products: They start you on basic features, then progressively reveal power-user capabilities that make the basic version feel limiting.

• Your business: What’s your escalation path? How do you deliver progressively more value as customers develop tolerance to your baseline offering?

Do this: Create tiers of experience within your product. Not just pricing tiers, actual capability tiers that unlock as people master the basics. Make them feel like they’re progressing, not just using.

4. Novelty

Dr. Lembke explains how algorithms learn what you like, then feed you similar-but-slightly-different content. It’s the slot machine effect. You’re hunting for treasure.

Why: Our brains are wired to notice novelty. It’s a survival mechanism. When you combine familiar rewards with unpredictable variation, you create a hook that’s almost impossible to escape.

How businesses screw this up: They become predictable. Same product, same experience, same messaging, same everything. Customers get bored and leave.

How to do it right:

• Starbucks: Seasonal drinks. Pumpkin Spice Latte isn’t about pumpkin, it’s about novelty within familiarity.

• Apple: Same ecosystem, new features every year. You know what you’re getting, but you don’t know what surprise is coming.

• McDonald’s: McRib appears and disappears. Limited-time offers create novelty and urgency within a familiar brand.

• Your business: What changes regularly? What stays the same? The core value should be consistent, but the expression of that value should evolve.

Do this: Build a content/feature/experience calendar that introduces new elements on a predictable schedule. Monthly drops, seasonal updates, weekly surprises, whatever fits your model. The key is regular novelty, not random chaos.

5. Uncertainty

Pathological gamblers release the most dopamine when their odds of winning and losing are equal. Not when they’re winning but when they might win.

Why: Guaranteed rewards become boring. Uncertain rewards keep us engaged. The anticipation is more powerful than the payoff.

How businesses screw this up: They make everything predictable. You buy the product, you get exactly what you expect, no surprises, no variation.

How to do it right:

• Costco: You never know what’s going to be in the treasure hunt section. That uncertainty keeps people walking the entire store.

• Loot boxes in games: Variable rewards for the same action. Some hate it, but it works because uncertainty is neurologically powerful.

• Email subject lines: “You won’t believe what happened” gets more opens than “March newsletter.”

• Your business: Where can you introduce positive uncertainty? Not fake scarcity or manipulative tactics, but genuine variation in outcomes that rewards exploration?

Do this: Look at your most predictable touchpoints. Can you introduce variation without destroying reliability? Random acts of customer delight, surprise upgrades, unexpected bonuses, these create dopamine spikes that predictable service never will.

The Integration: How these five work together

Here’s what makes this framework powerful: these characteristics compound.

Dr. Lembke mentions how looking at your smartphone creates a dopamine spike from the cue alone. Then, if you don’t get the reward you expected, you go into dopamine deficit and become more invested in continuing the behavior.

That’s the ultimate lock-in mechanism.

Real-world example: Instagram

1. Access: App on your phone, opens in one second

2. Quantity: Infinite scroll, never runs out of content

3. Potency: Algorithm learns what gets your attention, serves increasingly engaging content

4. Novelty: Every refresh shows something different but related to your interests

5. Uncertainty: You don’t know if the next post will be boring or mind-blowing, so you keep scrolling

The result? Billions of users checking multiple times per day, even when they consciously want to stop.

The ethical question nobody wants to ask

Should you do this?

You’re already doing it. Every business that creates repeat customers is leveraging some version of these principles, whether they know it or not.

The question is whether you’re doing it consciously and responsibly, or accidentally and poorly.

Here’s the conscious approach:

• Make access easy because removing friction serves your customers

• Provide abundant value because depth creates true loyalty

• Increase potency by genuinely improving your offering over time

• Introduce novelty to keep the experience fresh and relevant

• Use uncertainty to create delight, not manipulation

Do this:

Stop thinking about customer retention as a loyalty program problem. It’s a neuroscience problem.

Map your product experience against these five characteristics:

1. How easy is it to access your value? (Count the clicks)

2. How much value can someone extract before hitting limits? (Check your artificial caps)

3. How does the experience intensify as people engage more? (Define your escalation path)

4. What changes regularly to keep things fresh? (Build your novelty calendar)

5. Where do you introduce positive uncertainty? (Find your surprise moments)

Then systematically optimize each one.

You’re not manipulating people. You’re aligning your business model with how human brains actually work.

Because at the end of the day, brand loyalty isn’t about clever marketing or good customer service. It’s about creating neural pathways so strong that not using your product feels wrong.

Time to get busy friends. Stop reading and go optimize your access layer. That’s your highest-leverage starting point.

In the interview, Koontz mentioned that he used to outline everything early in his career. Publishers required it. They’d buy based on the outline, pay half upfront.

Then creative ideas emerged during execution that were better than the outline. The book improved beyond the plan.

But when he delivered? Publishers were disappointed. “This isn’t what we bought.”

“Yes, but it’s better than what you bought.”

Didn’t matter. They wanted the outline, not the improvement.

So Koontz stopped outlining entirely. Started letting characters drive the story. Gave them free will.

This applies everywhere. Your product roadmap. Your business strategy. Your AI implementation plan.

The problem with extensive planning isn’t that plans are bad. It’s that plans prevent you from discovering what’s actually better than the plan.

Plan enough to start. Then trust the process to reveal what you couldn’t see from the starting line.

You don’t get to choose whether they remember two things, the serial-position effect guarantees it. But, you DO get to choose WHICH two things they remember.

The serial position effect is a memory-related cognitive bias where individuals recall the first (primacy effect) and last (recency effect) items in a series better than those in the middle.

This is where most businesses fail. They present everything with equal weight, hoping prospects will naturally identify their strongest differentiators. That’s not how memory works.

Your job isn’t to present information. Your job is to architect memory.

In Growth Labs, we teach our 15 Growth Engines Framework—a comprehensive system for business transformation. Fifteen engines. Hundreds of concepts.

The challenge: How do you teach a complex system without overwhelming people or having them forget the most critical elements?

Answer: Focus on First & Last. Strategic sequencing of information using the serial-position effect.

We don't walk through all 15 engines robotically. We open with Vision & Purpose (your North Star) and close with The Multipliers (your competitive advantage). We position everything else as the machinery connecting them.

Why? Because when someone leaves that workshop, we want them remembering WHERE they're going and WHAT gives them an unfair advantage.

The middle builds the bridge. The bookends drive the transformation.

This isn’t about simplifying the framework. It’s about respecting how people process and retain complex information.

Think about the last compelling presentation you sat through. What do you remember? I guarantee it’s something from the first five minutes or the last five minutes. The middle? Blurry at best.

Now think about your own sales presentations, your website homepage, your pitch deck. Where are your strongest differentiators positioned?

Here’s the framework:

1. Open with your #1 value proposition—the one thing that makes prospects sit up and pay attention. This could be a bold claim, a unique positioning statement, or a result that seems impossible. This is your primacy anchor. Everything that follows will be filtered through this frame.

2. Close with your unfair advantage—the thing your competitors can’t easily replicate. This could be your pricing model, your delivery speed, your proprietary process, or your team structure. This is your recency anchor. This is what they’ll remember when comparing options.

3. Use the middle for proof—case studies, process details, team credentials, technical capabilities. This information matters, but its job isn’t to be remembered independently. Its job is to support the bookends with credibility.

The serial-position effect isn’t about dumbing down your presentation. It’s about respecting how memory works.

It doesn’t matter what you said. It matters what they remember.

Good enough gets in front of customers who tell you what actually matters. Good enough generates revenue that funds the next iteration. Good enough builds momentum while perfect sits in your drafts folder collecting dust.

Think about every successful product you use. None of them launched perfect.

iPhone 1 had no App Store.

Twitter was buggy as hell.

Amazon started selling books from a garage.

They shipped good enough and improved based on what the market told them mattered.

Your v1 doesn’t need to be your forever version. It needs to be your learning version.

The market will tell you what perfect looks like. But only if you give it something to react to.

Stop polishing. Start shipping.

I’ve been building businesses for 15+ years. DIESELHAUS has gone from a scrappy startup to a successful agency & product studio. We’ve developed systems, scaled teams, helped clients transform. By most measures, we’re “successful.”

And I still wake up some mornings wondering if I actually know what the hell I’m doing.

Arthur Brooks validated something I’ve felt for years but couldn’t articulate: If you’re doing well and you DON’T feel like an impostor sometimes, you might actually BE one.

Here’s the part that clicked for me:

When clients pay us, when Growth Lab members implement our 15 Growth Engines and get results, when our development team ships products that work, they’re seeing what we’re GOOD at. That’s why they hired us. That’s why they stay.

But I’m in here seeing the full landscape. The systems I haven’t built yet. The processes that could be tighter. The AI integration we’re still figuring out. The personal projects I overthink into paralysis.

Arthur calls this “negativity bias”. When we focus on what we don’t have instead of what we do. And when you’re a striver, when you’re ambitious, when you actually give a damn about getting better, this is completely normal.

The dangerous people? They don’t feel this at all.

Brooks talks about “dark triads”. People high in narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy. They’re 1 in 14 people. 7% of the population. And they feel ZERO imposter syndrome because they genuinely believe they deserve everything, even when they don’t.

You know them. They’ve taken credit for your work. They’ve been disloyal. They’ve broken your trust and felt no remorse.

If you’re successful and feel NO doubt? Red flag. If you’re successful and feel constant doubt? Green flag. You’re just seeing the whole picture.

So what do we do with this?

Brooks says: “Lean into the imposter syndrome without giving in to it.”

This is my approach now:

1. Acknowledge it. Yeah, I feel like an impostor sometimes. That’s because I’m aware of my weaknesses but I think it’s healthy (and humbling).

2. Leverage it. Those feelings point to EXACTLY where I need to grow. They’re not warning signs, they’re growth signals.

3. Don’t let it paralyze you. Feeling it is good. Letting it stop you from shipping is where it becomes destructive. As the saying goes… Don’t let perfect ruin good enough.

4. Keep the visibility advantage. I see things about my business others don’t see. That’s not proof I’m a fraud, it’s proof I’m paying attention.

For years, I thought the goal was to reach a level where I felt completely confident, completely certain, completely “arrived.”

Now I realize that feeling would mean I’ve stopped learning and growing.

The strivers, the musicians barely getting by but following their calling, the business owners building something meaningful, the teams pushing boundaries, we carry this weight. And it’s not a burden. It’s a compass.

If you’re building something real, if you’re pushing yourself, if you’re trying to 10x your output through better systems and AI and iteration, you’re going to feel like you don’t quite deserve it sometimes.

Good.

That means you’re not a dark triad. That means you’re human and you’re seeing clearly. That means you’re focused on growth.

The imposters don’t feel this way. But you do, because you’re a real one. And that’s exactly why you’re the one who deserves to be here.

Lean into it.