The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough
Original: The New AI Superpowers: Focus and Followthrough
Why This Matters
As AI tools proliferate, the human cost of AI-amplified overcommitment is emerging as a key productivity and wellness issue.
Writer Rick Manelius warns that AI's productivity gains are fueling a new kind of burnout. Rather than enabling people to do everything, AI amplifies ambition to unsustainable levels. His prescription: use AI to go deeper on fewer projects, not wider across more.
In a personal essay published July 26, 2026, Rick Manelius describes how access to AI tools like Claude initially led him to pursue over 40 simultaneous side projects — drafts, experiments, and 'proof of concept' ventures queued between meetings in 5-minute increments. The result was not increased satisfaction but a growing sense of burnout driven by open loops and self-generated make-work.
Manelius argues that conventional wisdom blaming burnout solely on overwork misses a key dynamic: AI raises the ceiling of what feels possible, triggering mass ambition inflation. Citing Greg McKeown's book 'Essentialism,' he advocates for a vertical rather than horizontal approach — using AI to go further on things that matter, not wider across more things.
He also references Garry Tan's essay on partial versus total eclipses to argue that the gap between 99% and 100% effort is not a rounding error but a 100x difference in impact. That final 1% of effort, he notes, often consumes 50–90% of total time — which is why most people settle for 'good enough.' Manelius concludes that focus and follow-through are the true AI-era superpowers.