Chase the contrary and contradictions
One of the great perils of AI, apart from the job loss stuff, is that we get more and more used to seeing views that confirm our beliefs. Partly because that’s the cozy thing for our brains to do, partly because AI hates disagreeing with us lest we stop using it, and for a people pleasing slot machine that’s no good.
So part of the job of using AI is not just about getting better at prompting, but getting better at rejection and contradiction and indeed seeking those things at any chance we get. In other words, when we’re researching something we shouldn’t just aim to validate views, we should also seek to destroy them.
By destroying I mean, to seek the contrary. To ask the AI directly, where is this not working? The great irony, at least for me, is that when I ask AI to roast my work I can’t take it personally, because it’s not a person doing it, it’s a machine. There’s no malice there, just mechanisms following orders.
And that, for me, is ok. It helps keep the cognitive atrophy at bay. More on this to come soon, as we’re plotting a panel on it with the Salmon Crew.
The other use case is precisely when we have so much to consume that we’re not at danger of being lazy by asking for confirmation, but we’re simply worried about wasting time for only consuming what confirms stuff we already kinda knew about. It’s a good feeling, but broadly an unhelpful one.
That’s right, I’m talking about 2026 culture and trends reports. Generally speaking, there is signal in the noise. But there’s also so much noise before you get into it, and therefore we get stuck in analysis paralysis around it. We stop ourselves from reading before we start, because it’s oh sooo daunting.
Except, there’s a simple trick I’ve now done probably a hundred times and the results are consistency good. Basically, go to your LLM of choice, load the document or thing you maybe want to read but are afraid it will only tell you what you already knew (“but it’s interesting” is not useful, sorry), and ask:
“What are the most counter-intuitive ideas in here?”
This not only saves you hours when trying to make sense of stuff, but also gives you hotter takes to proclaim in meetings if that’s your thing. And you may even find some of the most counter-intuitive ideas you receive are a direct contradiction of some other reports, and that’s fine. That’s the point.
If all we get are confirmations of where our heads are at, that’s the opposite of growth. That’s how we get comfy, fall asleep and then miss the train. But if you make a habit of living within contradictions, being alive in the odd space between venn diagrams that may not always make sense, that’s growth. It’s uncomfortable, but then again so is exercise and yet we all need some of it.
And this sort of growth, born out of tension which in turn creates a form of intellectual, creative and spiritual vibrancy, is where a lot of commercial growth ultimately comes from. Because if there’s one thing that’s true in advertising is that without tension you don’t get a release. So to find more ways to unlock a release and profit from it, learn to live with tensions and contradictions as if your professional life depends on it. It probably does.
