I've been sitting with two ideas that don't belong: Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer's research on mindlessness, and retired Navy Seal Jocko Willink’s "Dichotomy of Leadership."
Langer's core insight, from her conversation with Rich Roll, is that we treat traits, decisions, and people as fixed and knowable, when they're neither. She puts it simply: "Rather than waste your time being stressed over making the right decision, make the decision right." And she means it at every scale, not just the big ones. She'll apply that same logic to which candy bar to grab and to who to marry or what job to take. The stress was never proportional to the size of the decision. It's proportional to how convinced you are that a single correct answer exists to be found, rather than one you build after the fact. The same logic applies to how we read people, too. The exact quality that made you fall for someone is the one that annoys you five years later: "stable" becomes "boring," "spontaneous" becomes "impulsive." Nothing about the person changed. Your framing did. Certainty about who someone is, including yourself, is what Langer calls mindlessness. It's the thing that keeps you from noticing the shift.
Mindlessness isn't stupidity, and it isn't laziness. It's what happens the moment a category feels settled, and you’ve cataloged someone. Once you've decided someone is "the unreliable one" or "the aggressive closer," you stop updating. You stop looking, because you've already filed the answer as known. Langer's research found we do this on autopilot constantly. That record player in your mind keeps spinning long after the person, or you, have moved into new dimensions of growth. That's the exact mechanism behind a blind spot. The trait was never hidden. You just stopped checking where it currently sits, because you'd already decided you knew.
Jocko is one of my favorites. I listen to lots of his podcasts during my long runs. He makes almost the identical argument about leadership. Every strength, pushed far enough, becomes the failure mode. "Extreme Ownership is the foundation of good leadership," he writes. "But leadership seldom requires extreme ideas or attitudes... leadership requires balance."
How have we seen this play in the business world? The closer who never lets go of a deal becomes the closer who can't read the room, and needs to stop talking. The founder who owns everything, complaining of long hours, and weak employees, ends up with a team that owns nothing. "Leaders must find the balance...They must drive their team to accomplish the mission without driving them off a cliff."
Personality is not a fixed asset column. It's a dial. Whatever made you a success is sitting at some setting right now, and the only thing standing between that setting and the one that ends your career is whether you can feel where the needle is - the demanding email or slack message you shouldn't have sent. That is the blind spot: not lacking the trait, but losing the ability to sense where it's currently pointing.
Here's where I think incorporating AI into your workflows can cause concern. I use Claude every day (in fact, I used both Claude and Gemini to help me write this), and what it does well is not make better decisions for me, or help me dull those sharp edges or expose my blind spots. I would argue that it does the opposite: It heightens whatever you're already feeling, and it collapses the time between impulse and execution. The email you'd have drafted, sat on, and softened over a few days now goes out in ninety seconds. The aggressive close gets faster, more aggressive to the point where its a turn off. The overcorrection gets faster. Whatever setting your dial is on, AI doesn't move it toward balance. It just gets you there quicker.
So we can't outsource this one. The dichotomy doesn't get solved by better tools. It gets solved by the same unglamorous discipline Langer and Jocko both point to: noticing, in real time, where you actually are on the dial, before the tool you're using helps you get there faster.
Hope this helps! I will comment on a few personality traits I have that can definitely cut both ways.
Sources: Dr. Ellen Langer on the Rich Roll Podcast; Jocko Podcast episode 138 with Leif Babin on "The Dichotomy of Leadership."
If your team is scaling fast and wants to build the judgment to match the speed, we'd love to talk. Praecipio helps leaders spot where their strengths are tipping into liabilities before AI gets them there faster.Praecipio helps organizations design AI implementations that amplify the people behind the work.
Laszlo Szalvay is Chief Revenue Officer at Praecipio.
