THINK: When Every Mind Has Superpowers

When I was a boy, my father worked for IBM.

I remember a little desk sign he brought home. White capital letters on a black tile. It contained just one word:

THINK.

No elaborate explanation. No inspirational paragraph. Just five letters and an instruction.

At the time, I couldn’t have imagined how relevant that little sign would become more than half a century later.

Today, I spend much of my working life collaborating with artificial intelligence. I can explore ideas, develop strategies, create content, design systems, and orchestrate work that once would have required a substantial team.

And the more powerful these tools become, the more I find myself returning to that one word.

THINK.

An Old Idea That Refuses to Get Old

Thomas J. Watson Sr. made THINK a defining part of IBM’s culture. The message was deceptively simple: don’t merely go through the motions. Use your head. Question assumptions. Exercise judgment.

It wasn’t a call to work harder. It was a call to engage the most valuable resource in the organization: the human mind.

The idea wasn’t unique to IBM, of course.

In the seventeenth century, philosopher René Descartes gave us one of history’s most famous declarations: “I think, therefore I am.”

Centuries later, Henry Ford was associated with another enduring observation: “Whether you think you can, or you think you can’t, you’re right.”

The two statements approach thinking from very different directions. One concerns consciousness and existence; the other concerns belief and possibility.

But both place thought at the center of the human experience.

And there’s a reason the word keeps appearing whenever people talk about achievement, invention, and progress.

Before we build something, we have to conceive of it.

Before we change something, we have to recognize that it could be different.

Think and Grow Rich — With a New Kind of Imagination

Napoleon Hill published Think and Grow Rich in 1937.

I’ve read it, and what strikes me now is how naturally its central themes connect to the world of AI.

Hill emphasized desire, imagination, planning, persistence, and the transformation of ideas into action. Some of his claims were philosophical rather than scientific, but his larger argument was compelling: achievement begins with a deliberate act of thought.

He also described creative imagination as a way of receiving ideas from beyond ordinary conscious reasoning.

We don’t have to accept that literally to recognize an intriguing modern parallel.

When I collaborate with an AI model, I’m not simply asking it to retrieve a paragraph from a filing cabinet. I’m asking it to combine concepts, explore possibilities, and produce connections that may never have appeared together in quite that form.

Sometimes the result surprises me.

That’s what makes generative AI so fascinating. It offers something resembling synthetic imagination at industrial scale.

But there’s an important difference between the machine and the person using it.

The machine has no personal ambition. It doesn’t care whether I succeed. It doesn’t have a business to build, a family to support, or a dream it wants to pursue.

I do.

The AI can broaden the possibilities. I have to decide which possibilities matter.

The machine widens the possibilities. We still have to know which ones matter.

Hill’s emphasis on purposeful thinking hasn’t become obsolete. If anything, it has become more important.

From One Person Thinking to Everybody Thinking

Another fascinating chapter in this story comes from manufacturing.

The Toyota Production System, developed through the work of leaders including Taiichi Ohno, helped establish a powerful principle: improvement shouldn’t be reserved for executives and engineers.

The people doing the work should also be able to identify problems, suggest improvements, and help make the system better.

That philosophy is closely associated with kaizen, or continuous improvement.

It’s not quite the same thing as IBM’s THINK culture, but there’s a common thread.

Human intelligence shouldn’t be confined to a small group at the top.

The person closest to a problem may be the person best positioned to recognize it.

And when an organization encourages more people to contribute their thinking, it expands its capacity to improve.

In my mind, the evolution looks something like this:

IBM reminded people to think.

Toyota demonstrated the power of getting everybody thinking.

And now AI is opening the possibility of helping everybody accomplish more with their thinking.

That’s an extraordinary progression.

Science Fiction Is Imagination Rehearsing the Future

There’s another place we’ve seen the power of thought demonstrated repeatedly: science fiction.

Jules Verne imagined remarkable journeys and machines. Arthur C. Clarke explored technologies that would later become familiar. Star Trek introduced audiences to communicators, talking computers, and other devices that once seemed impossibly futuristic.

Not every fictional invention becomes real. And fiction doesn’t always precede the underlying science.

But the influence runs both ways.

Sometimes technology inspires fiction. Sometimes fiction inspires the engineers and entrepreneurs who make the technology possible.

A story invites us to ask, What if?

A determined inventor eventually asks, Why not?

Computer scientist Alan Kay is famous for the idea that the best way to predict the future is to invent it.

That’s the difference between imagining a future and helping bring it into existence.

For most of history, there was an enormous gap between the two.

A person could imagine an invention without having the engineering skills, financial resources, production facilities, or staff to create it.

Today, AI is beginning to narrow that gap.

It can help research an idea, challenge assumptions, draft a plan, produce a prototype, and coordinate the next steps.

It doesn’t make every dream feasible. But it can make the journey from what if to how might we dramatically more accessible.

The Brain Hasn’t Changed. Its Reach Has.

Here’s something important I’ve noticed in my own work.

AI hasn’t suddenly made me a better thinker.

I’ve spent decades building a business, working with clients, solving problems, making mistakes, and learning from them. My judgment, instincts, imagination, and experience developed over that time.

Those things haven’t been downloaded into my brain by a chatbot.

What AI has done is make me capable of accomplishing far more with the thinking ability I already possess.

That’s a crucial distinction.

Take the owner of a small sign company.

Running that business involves far more than making signs. There are designs and estimates, customer communications, scheduling, purchasing, approvals, marketing, bookkeeping, and dozens of other responsibilities.

Traditionally, growing the company might mean adding people to handle each of those functions.

Now imagine the owner thinking about the business as a larger enterprise, identifying its essential departments and processes, and using AI to support the work wherever appropriate.

The owner still needs experience, customer relationships, craftsmanship, and sound judgment.

But the business may no longer need to grow its head count in direct proportion to every new capability it develops.

One person’s thinking can reach across an organization in ways that were previously difficult or prohibitively expensive.

That’s not just automation.

It’s leverage.

Pareto Meets Artificial Intelligence

Which brings me to another familiar idea: the Pareto Principle.

Often expressed as the 80/20 rule, it suggests that a relatively small share of inputs frequently accounts for a disproportionately large share of results.

For years, the usual business lesson has been to identify the vital 20% and spend less time on the less productive 80%.

That’s useful advice.

But AI introduces a much more exciting possibility.

What if, instead of concentrating only on eliminating low-value work, we used AI to make our most valuable 20% dramatically more powerful?

For an entrepreneur, that vital 20% might be recognizing opportunities, developing relationships, making strategic decisions, or imagining new products and services.

Those are the activities where experience, judgment, and originality make the biggest difference.

AI can extend the reach of those strengths.

I don’t find the prospect of saving a few minutes on an administrative task nearly as exciting as the prospect of taking an idea I care about and doing something with it that would previously have been beyond my practical reach.

The old 80/20 question was: How can I spend less time on the things that matter least?

The new question might be: How can I multiply the impact of the things that matter most?

That’s the AI opportunity that excites me.

When Everybody Has Superpowers

In another article, I compared AI to Popeye’s can of spinach: something that gives an ordinary person extraordinary strength.

But that raises an interesting question.

What happens when everybody gets a can?

What happens when the capabilities that once distinguished a large enterprise become available to a small business owner, an independent professional, a student, or an aspiring inventor?

In a sense, the playing field begins to change.

The tools don’t erase differences in experience, resources, skill, or opportunity. But they can reduce some of the barriers that once prevented people from acting on their ideas.

And that means more people may be able to participate in creating the future rather than simply watching it unfold.

The most remarkable thing about AI may not be that machines can generate answers.

It may be that more human beings can finally do something meaningful with the questions they’ve been carrying around for years.

Back to That Little Sign

I keep thinking about my father’s IBM sign.

THINK.

When I was young, it seemed like a straightforward piece of advice.

Now it feels almost prophetic.

It hasn’t replaced my imagination, experience, ambition, or judgment.

It’s given them room to travel.

If everybody eventually has access to something resembling superpowers, then possessing the tools won’t be the most interesting distinction between us.

What we choose to imagine, pursue, and create will matter enormously.

More than fifty years later, I think my father’s little sign still has the right message.

Perhaps now more than ever.

THINK.