In Defense of Strategic Foolishness

When You Can Outsource Everything, What’s Left?

I feel like we’re at the point of our relationship where I can be vulnerable with you.

I’ve had a very traumatic history with ‘90s Disney movies.

I remember getting the flu when I was 5 after seeing Beauty & the Beast for the first time and throwing up all over my parents’ Isuzu Trooper.

I remember being super unsure what was happening to my insides the first time I saw Jessica Rabbit.

But I think my earliest memory was seeing The Little Mermaid in the theatre for some kid’s birthday party around the time I was 4. And, I’m not ashamed to admit this, all I really remember is how freaked out and frightened I was by Ursula, the villain.

As scared as I was back then though, I think she’s even scarier to me now as a grownup because I now realize she represents one of the most vile things you can do to a person…the thing she does to the little mermaid…she steals her voice.

Have you ever had those dreams when you’re trying to shout and you’ve literally lost your voice? Creepy, scary stuff.

If you’re navigating anything—a team, a brand, a family, a community—you know those moments where you HAVE to find your voice. You HAVE to know where it sits and what it believes. You get that there’s a difference between being heard and listened to.

I’ve noticed lately how much we’ve all been using AI to help us when it comes to this. These tools can be incredibly helpful, especially when we’re trying to write that email to a teacher, or that scope-creeping client, or maybe an uncooperative co-parent, and we don’t want to come off as too weak or confusing, or maybe we just don’t want to sound as angry as we really feel inside.

And it can feel like magic, right? We suddenly sound WAY more professional than we actually find ourselves in the moment. It can turn…

“Hey Ms. So-and-so, why is my kid being bullied? What the bleepity-bleep is going on in your classroom??”

to

“Hi Ms. So-and-so, I wanted to check in about some ongoing peer interactions that my child is finding upsetting.”

It does a really good job of de-escalating conflict.

But I’ve also noticed that we’ve started to outsource these same tools to those moments where it’s imperative that the thing that shows up is our own unique and unmistakable voice.

What’s funny about this moment in time is that it’s getting easier and easier to identify a voice…It just happens to belong to AI. We all know it. AI has a certain way of saying things, certain preferences, hooks, structures, etc. It’s incredible at writing correctly.

What’s becoming rarer are the moments we can identify someone else’s unique voice, whether that’s a brand, a leader, or an artist.

It’s now become a competitive edge to sound like yourself.

In our current climate, what’s more likely to get people to pay attention, to stop scrolling for a second…more stuff that’s written/said in the generic tone of AI? Or something spoken in a unique tone and rhythm, an idea that carries a particular identity?

For all the talk of upskilling and optimizing during this moment, there’s one skill I see worth honing that I don’t hear mentioned a lot.

Courage.

As far as I can tell, courage is one of the few human attributes AI can’t really emulate, at least on its own, because courage is the ability to look at the available data, and choose to bypass it, to go against it. Courage is, “if you do this thing, the chance of this bad thing happening is high” and deciding “I’m going to do it anyway.” It’s Han Solo energy. Remember that scene where he’s about to navigate an asteroid field and C-3PO tells him the chances of surviving are 3,720 to 1? What does Han say? “Never tell me the odds!”

Recklessness ignores the odds. Courage understands them and still chooses action.

Courage is “strategic foolishness,” the art of ignoring “should” in favor of an unapparent upside.

So when it comes to our voice, courage may be purposely choosing to say something in a way that doesn’t default to the most simple, or the most punchy, or the most grammatically correct. It may be choosing to meander a bit, or inject your own sense of humor, or acknowledge that we’re all navigating an asteroid field instead of acting like it isn’t there.

Sometimes courage looks like slowing down enough to consider that thing that gives you an advantage over “instant content.”

There’s that old quote by Miles Davis, “Sometimes you have to play a long time to be able to play like yourself.”

Maybe that’s the real challenge of this moment.

We live in a culture tilted heavily toward efficiency. But a voice isn’t something you optimize into existence. It’s something you develop over time. It’s the accumulation of experiences, convictions, quirks, observations, scars, jokes, rhythms, and stories—the wonderfully laborious work of paying attention to what you actually think and believe.

Which is why I suspect one of the most valuable things we can do right now is resist the urge to outsource those parts of our identity that make us recognizable.

The irony is that in a world where everyone has access to the same exact tools, sounding like yourself may become one of the few advantages that actually compounds.*

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*If this idea resonates, this week’s podcast episode goes deeper. I talk about a project we produced that completely changed how I think about voice, identity, and what happens when people discover they no longer have to follow a script. It starts with a school bus, a recording studio, and me thinking (as usual) “God, I sure hope this works.”

Or listen on Apple Podcasts or Spotify