Maintenance For Business Owners
Ask any plant operator or facilities manager, and they’ll tell you: if you don’t schedule maintenance for your equipment, your equipment will schedule it for you. By breaking down.
Do you enjoy an activity like skiing or bicycling that requires specific, sometimes (or often) expensive, equipment? Or a hobby that does?
How do you take care of your equipment? You probably do devote some time, energy, and money to maintaining it in a condition where you can use it. Especially if it’s expensive and/or hard to replace. Right?
So if you can schedule maintenance for things like skis, bikes, quilting arms on the sewing machine, factory machines, etc. … why are you so hesitant to spend time on maintaining your brain?
AI isn’t going to help your brain
A reminder that for business owners, your most important asset is your brain. Not your computer, and not even your team, though hopefully they’re awesome. The firm starts with just you and your thoughts. So anything that’s good for your brain is going to be good for your business, and if it’s bad for your brain it’s probably bad for business too.
Here’s a reminder that generative AI – all the LLMs you know as Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Nano Banana, etc. – are all based on outright theft of copyrighted works that have been used to train the AI. All of them. There is not a single generative AI model I’m aware of that does not include IP theft.
Also a reminder that generative AI takes up far more power and energy than a “regular” internet browser search. That includes water, which in some areas of our country and others is a scarce resource.
Not to mention that AI will always generate “hallucinations”, e.g. things that are simply not true. All the developers of AI have said this; these hallucinations are simply a result of the algorithms underlying these models and will never go away. No matter how much more training the models undergo, they will always be wrong sometimes. Which means you must always review your AI output.
All this is true, but it’s still not the main reason why you shouldn’t be using AI to generate ANY content, at all, in your business. (You might use it to summarize articles or documents, or edit them in a particular way, but it’s a bad idea to use AI to create your sales pages, LI content, images, and so forth.)
That’s because with the brain, if you don’t use it or you lose it. If you always ask AI for answers, you will lose the ability to think critically. The research that we already have, even though not everyone is using AI, shows that when people rely on AI for things they lose the ability to do those things.
If you keep outsourcing your decision making to AI, you’ll lose the ability to make good decisions yourself. If you keep outsourcing your LI posts to AI, you’ll lose the ability to tell your story in a way that makes sense. (And also, your story is going to sound like everyone else’s story that’s already out there.)
Losing the ability to think on your own might not seem like that big a deal now, but it might come back to bite you in the butt later.
Maintaining your brain makes you more productive in a sustainable way
Doing office work for your brain includes as much wear and tear as a factory machine that’s constantly working. That’s why self-care isn’t a luxury or a wish or something to do after you’ve already done everything else for everybody or a selfish activity for you to engage in.
It’s simply the maintenance of your brain and body so that you can operate at peak performance. And be productive so you’re getting all the important work done, but without burnout and depression.
Your brain’s factory settings include a scheduled shutdown overnight: seven to eight hours. Reminder that only about 1% of the population can get by with four to five hours most nights. And if you drink tea, energy drinks, or coffee and/or eat sweet treats all day to stay awake, you are most definitely NOT in that 1%.
So work backward from the time you get up to figure out when to go to bed. If you want to get up at four, you need to go to bed at eight.
Your brain also needs:
Rest breaks after periods of focused, intense work
Exercise throughout the day (doesn’t have to be formal trips to the gym, just get off your butt)
Hydration
Good nutrition
Hobbies/fun activities outside work
Socializing (more for extroverts, less for introverts)
This is self-care. Giving your brain and body what they need so you can stay healthy emotionally, mentally, and physically.
Sustainable productivity in the workplace helps you later in life
Everything that’s good for your brain is good for your body and mood, etc. If you do all of the things mentioned above, not only will you be more productive, but you’ll probably be feeling less stressed and happier as well.
Taking care of your brain now also helps you later in life. Brain diseases like dementia are thought to be caused by accumulating beta amyloid plaques in the brain. (It’s not proven that’s the case, but the association is definitely there.)
One of the things that happens when you get the full sleep you need is that the cells flush out harmful toxins and debris that have accumulated over the day. Including what could end up in those beta amyloid plaques.
Everything that helps you maintain your brain for productivity also helps prevent inflammation, which is linked to a variety of diseases and conditions like cardiovascular disease, cancer, dementia, etc. Using your brain as you grow older – not working, but maybe being with other people, solving puzzles, playing music, and dancing – seems to have a preventative effect as well.
My concern (we haven’t had AI for long enough yet to know whether or not this is true), is that heavy users could end up with neurodegenerative diseases like dementia as a result of literally outsourcing their thinking.
If you ask AI to do all your critical thinking and decision making for long enough, you’ll start losing your ability to do so. And I think if you play the tape forward from there, you end up with higher dementia rates compared to people who kept thinking instead of letting AI do all the work.
I don't know for a fact that's what will happen, but based on what we know about the brain, it’s pretty plausible. So I’m keeping my thinking instead of delegating it to AI, thank you.
Recap (tl;dr):
You maintain your expensive hobby or sports equipment, so why don’t you do the same for your brain? Beware of AI and make sure you’re doing what’s good for your brain now and later in life.
Don’t see how you can survive without outsourcing everything to AI? Let’s talk about more sustainable decisions that will keep you and your brain humming along. Click to set up a free consultation.
Photo by Bohdan Kadun on Unsplash.