Energy Is More Important Than Intelligence

The purpose of any leader is to bring action. Leaders are shakers. They cannot be still or at peace. It's easy to forget these days.

That's the burden of leadership: you must accept discomfort to turn your vision into reality. It's the opposite of happiness, which is about being at peace with no desire. Just being still. That's something we dream of, even when we know it's something we will never have.

If you don't have the fire to make things happen, you're fucked.

Think about it. AI has dropped the cost of intelligence to zero. It's no longer an edge at work. When you have access to all the world's knowledge for free, intelligence becomes irrelevant. Anyone can have it.

So, what becomes the edge?

The only thing that matters now is the ability to turn ideas into action. To do something and stick to it for long enough. And that's hard when you're drowning in free entertainment, such as YouTube, Netflix, and social media, along with algorithms built to take away your attention.

I wanted to write this because, for the first 40 years of my life, I had one goal: to be the smartest person in the room. I read endlessly. Collected books and obsessed with truth. In my mind, a successful man was the smartest one.

Not anymore.

My aspiration now is to have energy, not intelligence. I still read. I still ask questions. But my focus has shifted to writing, listening, and deciding what to work on.

And I've learned what drains me. Being on video calls too much, dealing with bureaucracy, and facing situations where, no matter what I do, I can't control the outcome. It's easy to find people who exhaust me, while it's hard to find the ones who recharge me.

Funny enough, I've had to slow down to speed up. Managing energy, not time, has kept me focused on what really matters. Especially now, when most of the things I was used to do are automated with software.

This is why energy is more important than intelligence.

Don't let it go to waste.