I was listening to someone recently say to a big group: “AI will give you strategy — you don’t have a clarity problem! Your real issue is with capacity.” My eyes widened — she was dead wrong.
We are in a clarity epidemic.
With the fast rise of AI and the inevitable mass distribution of slop, we don’t just consume AI slop. We are at risk of thinking like AI slop. AI aside, we are at risk of being cognitively shaped by the algorithms our mindless scrolls meticulously sculpt for us. Our patterns are reinforced based on what we consume — and those patterns turn into values. Clarity has never mattered more and cannot be outsourced to an algorithm or AI.
The clearest articulation of what’s actually happening came from a TikTok (the source of much of my inspiration, won’t even lie about it iykyk):
“You don’t actually have values. You have patterns, and your brain builds them from what you allow — not what you believe. Every time that you tolerate something that goes against your values, you tell your brain that it’s acceptable. What’s actually happening is that your brain builds your identity through these repeated behaviors.” Vickery Mahmoud
Vickery goes on to talk about the impact of these behaviors: low effort, being disrespected, behavior your brain doesn’t register as a mistake — it registers as you. And the more you repeat it, the more your brain lowers standards.
His primary argument is that when you tolerate something that contradicts what you believe, the brain doesn’t register it as a lapse. It registers it as you. Over time, instead of your brain rising to meet your beliefs, it drops to meet your behaviors. The mechanism is cognitive dissonance — your brain resolves the gap by moving your standards down, not by moving your behavior up.
When behavior contradicts belief, belief shifts to match.1
Your brain builds identity by repeated behavior, not belief — and the neuroscience that backs his claim is Hebbian learning, which suggests that repeated behavior physically strengthens the associated neural pathways.2 So you need high standards to cue your brain, repeatedly and specifically, toward the identity you’re constructing. Setting a standard requires direction, which ultimately leads to clarity. Direction leads to habits, and habits — not intentions — drive the majority of your behavior.3
In an age where what you watch online reinforces what the algorithm will serve you, Vickery is right that high standards have never mattered more.
Because what I’ll argue today is that standards shape behavior, behavior shapes identity, identity is reinforced by your environment, and your environment leads you to clarity, which enables — really — anything. Clarity is the prize as you descend into the work, not the ticket to entry. Let’s get into it.
So you should have high standards. High standards are the first step in the path to clarity — because often clarity follows from behavior, it doesn’t precede it.
I didn’t wake up in my twenties knowing that I wanted to build a logistics SaaS company. I lived every day according to my values: work hard, be curious, develop a love for big creative problems and execute, don’t make excuses. And the clarity for building a business came later.
I didn’t wake up in my thirties knowing I wanted to write a book about it. I aligned with my standards. Communicate better, build an audience based on knowledge, write concisely but effectively. And the clarity of my writing came after trying a multitude of approaches.
My biggest feats have been a result of high standards, not clarity. But standards don’t emerge in a vacuum.
Your standards are an outcome of environmental design, more than a character trait.
When I was a grad student in Boston, my friend Marzyeh had friends over nearly every night. The unspoken rule was she’d feed us, and we would hang out and read to her kids. It was a foundational decision to make sure her kids were surrounded by intelligent people, she often admitted.
Science shows us that the easiest way to have higher standards is to have friends aligned with who you want to be. The people you spend time with are your reference group — they are the people you measure yourself against when you make career decisions, get dressed, or pick a partner. Your reference group will validate your decisions because your brain uses others to calibrate what’s a good decision.4 And your goals are a byproduct of perception and what you see as possible.
The reason friends are so important is they shift your perception.
In the 1930s, researcher Muzafer Sherif proved this when he put people in a dark room, created a single point of light on a wall, and asked each person how far the light moved. The study relied on something called the autokinetic effect — a perceptual trick where a stationary light in a dark room appears to shift because your eyes are constantly making tiny adjustments, and without anything fixed to anchor against, your brain invents motion to explain them. In this effect, everyone sees something different and is certain they are right.
As individuals, each person developed their own answer. Some said the light moved two inches, others believed it moved six inches. Then Sherif put the participants in groups and had them call out their estimates out loud, in front of each other, over several sessions. Gradually and without orchestration, the estimates converged on consensus. The group built a number based off of each other’s influence and not objective facts. When Sherif sent the group back into the room alone, they didn’t return to their original answer. Even with the social pressure gone, the group’s deliberation became the norm. Sherif called this internalization — not compliance or performance — because the group had rewritten what each person privately believed.
That’s the impact of a reference group. Do you and your friends talk about salary? Good relationships? Ambition? Do you gossip day and night? Did your parents pay for private school, where the culture was focused on elite colleges and screen-free exploration?(Ofc there is an angle that must be acknowledged, and it’s proximity/privilege and reference groups — I can write a whole other article on access and reference groups). While you might think those are your standards, they are the standards you built in consensus with the people you surround yourself by. And you continue to carry them out.
Is your environment calibrating you toward who you want to become or is it quietly pulling you down? Your friends aren’t just shaping your behavior — they’re shaping your ceiling by shaping your standards.
Clarity is often inefficient, but it’s a prerequisite for efficiency. We are sold efficiency with the promise of clarity in so many ways.
Dating apps provide the promise of efficiently finding a partner, filtered to your needs. Yet every one of my girlfriends searching for a partner complains of the mental fatigue. The apps provide pipeline. Broad, kinda filtered — but efficient — pipeline. The clarity required to settle on a life partner is slow. And painful.
Back to my opening: perhaps the most omnipresent form of efficiency without clarity is AI slop. AI is particularly notorious for offering efficiency — and often, it does. At the risk of losing some of you, I will openly confess that I love AI. I use AI. But I don’t rely on AI for the parts of my life that have to be human. I just got done talking to an enterprise sales consultant who talked about how he set up an AI agent (agent: a series of actions that happen automatically, without your involvement) to bring in pipeline for businesses. Quite like dating apps, business pipeline is often the wide, messy, barely accurate first shot at finding potential buyers. He said every time a demo request comes in, his agent researches the companies, finds the pain points via internet scraping, and reaches out to the prospects. “What’s the average deal size?” I asked, trying to size up who he targets. “$40,000-$50,000,” he replied. “That won’t work,” I replied directly. He was taken aback by my crudeness — but as someone who has been in the business of selling enterprise software for over a decade, unless the product is singularly threaded and solves one pain (like cloud storage, maybe), you can’t figure out a company’s pain points via an internet search.
Figuring out an issue or problem is inefficient. It’s like trying to figure out what someone really wants through a dating profile. It requires conversations via discovery, and it has to thread back to the company’s needs.
Ok, so you need cloud storage — is it because your goals are revenue for the year and your servers need to enable a wider workforce? Or because your servers had a data leak and you have a liability issue? Or is it because you want to go remote and cut your overhead in prep for a sale? These are all very different conversations that require the creativity of the human brain. The real question is how I can convince you that the issue necessitating cloud storage costs more than $50,000 a year so you can spend some time exploring solutions with me. Which is a conversation that requires cognitively heavy dot connecting based on expertise, judgment, and good questions. When you jump into AI agents or prompts before clarity, your outcome will be bad.
AI slop is efficiency without clarity.
Efficiency without clarity doesn’t save time. It wastes time by positioning you in the wrong direction. As our world becomes more digital and as we lean on AI more, clarity will become one of the most underrated skills of our time. Everything relies on it.
And shortcuts to clarity are being commodified.
Like a diet pill selling the promise of the body without the work, your algorithm is assembling a digital composition of your interests, ambitions, and reference points. Your AI is offering a quick road to redemption, a shortcut to ambition, or whatever else you’re searching for.
The algorithm doesn’t know what you want. It knows what you’ve clicked. And without clarity, you’ll feel the slow erosion of knowing what you want.
You can’t buy direction. You can only build it.
When someone tells me they are in a rut, my response is predictable:
You lack a goal (can’t get started)
You lack a path (getting started in the wrong direction), or
You are emotionally dysregulated (mood is getting in the way/too scared to start, etc)
We know that specific, challenging goals outperform vague ones.5 And it’s obvious a goal needs a path. But what about your feelings getting in the way of your goals?
Emotional regulation isn’t about calming down. It’s about freeing up cognitive space — the budget required for mental peace or capacity or whatever you need to execute. If you are scared you can’t do the thing, or anxious you can’t do it right, or bored, you won’t do it. Emotional dysregulation doesn’t always manifest via a big, obvious breakdown. Often, dysregulation manifests through a person who is running a background process that is draining their cognitive budget, the same budget required to pursue goals and hold standards.6
The antidote to dysregulation isn’t calm — it’s direction. Which brings us back to clarity. Once you have clarity, you can make sure your decisions follow a vision and plan.
Clarity is a decision, not a state of mind. Clarity is often treated like an otherworldly intuition, a moment when everything clicks. In reality, clarity is the commitment you make to your values before having all of the information. Clarity comes after the decision, not before. Waiting to feel clear is as unproductive as waiting to feel ready.
Clarity directs habits. Habits are built based on how you respond to cravings. And cravings aren’t random urges — they are learned brain states shaped by dopamine, memory, attention, and habit. If you reinforce how you respond to cravings, that’s who you are. If you rewire it (a big benefit of clarity) by pausing and choosing a different response, you build a new circuit over time. Because real neuroplasticity happens slowly through repetition, it’s not an instant reset.78
And repetition over time needs clarity. I’ve written about how your curiosity is for sale, and now your clarity is for sale too. Don’t bite.
You made it to the end! What did you think?! Leave me a comment or a like — I love reading your comments, and happy Eid to those celebrating!
Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive consequences of forced compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58(2), 203–210.
Hebb, D. O. (1949). The organization of behavior: A neuropsychological theory. Wiley.
Wood, W., Quinn, J. M., & Kashy, D. A. (2002). Habits in everyday life: Thought, emotion, and action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 83(6), 1281–1297.
Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7(2), 117–140.
Locke, E. A., & Latham, G. P. (2002). Building a practically useful theory of goal setting and task motivation: A 35-year odyssey. American Psychologist, 57(9), 705–717.
Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299.
Brewer, J. A., Elwafi, H. M., & Davis, J. H. (2013). Craving to quit: Psychological models and neurobiological mechanisms of mindfulness training as treatment for addictions. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors, 27(2), 366–379.
Brewer, J. A., Mallik, S., Babuscio, T. A., Nich, C., Johnson, H. E., Deleone, C. M., Minnix-Cotton, C. A., Byrne, S. A., Kober, H., Weinstein, A. J., Carroll, K. M., & Rounsaville, B. J. (2011). Mindfulness training for smoking cessation: Results from a randomized controlled trial. Drug and Alcohol Dependence, 119(1–2), 72–80.
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