While scrolling X last night, I watched two tech founders celebrate hitting a decent MRR recurring revenue with their new AI writing tool. They’re pitching investors. Planning their scale strategy. Building hype.
They have 18 months before their business value hits zero.
Not because the tool doesn’t work. Because AI writing tools are commoditizing at light speed.
Every writing tool on the market does the same thing: analyze style, generate content, automate distribution. The cost of brilliant content creation has collapsed 99%.
Anyone can replicate your writing style. Anyone can produce thousands of words. Anyone can generate engagement-optimized posts.
Execution advantages are dead.
Which raises the question that separates winners from losers in the next decade: if creating amazing content is now trivial, why isn’t the internet drowning in it?
And why is the content out there just average?
The Shift That Kills Most AI Businesses
We’ve entered the idea economy. James Altucher’s term for the era when ideas matter more than execution.
This isn’t coming. It’s here. Right now.
AI embeds deeper into every system daily. Detecting cancers. Analyzing education systems. Writing code. Generating designs.
Someone wins big from AI.
But not the people building the hundredth AI writing tool. They’re competing in the execution layer—the layer AI just commoditized.
Winners will be determined by who brings the best ideas to AI. Not who uses AI best.
I spent Sunday using ChatGPT to analyze my daughter’s AI-powered homeschool and develop strategies for improving her educational outcomes.
The AI was brilliant—synthesizing education research, suggesting frameworks I hadn’t considered, building comprehensive improvement plans.
But it generated zero original ideas. Every insight came from me. The AI amplified my thinking, organized my notes, structured my approach. It’s now an embedded project in my ChatGPT console that I’ll iterate on for months.
The AI didn’t create the vision. I did. The AI executed.
That’s the pattern.
AI is your execution engine. You’re the idea generator. Your value lives entirely in idea quality.
Why Baron Munchausen Would Beat You Today
Let’s consider two historical examples that prove ideas always mattered more than execution.
Example 1: The Ridiculous Stories That Won
Rudolf Erich Raspe published The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen in 1736. A German librarian writing about a baron who traveled to the moon, rode cannonballs, got swallowed by giant fish.
The stories were obvious lies. None of it was real. But the Baron was famous.
It became a cultural phenomenon. Inspired major films. Made Baron Munchausen one of history’s most memorable entertainers.
He won with pure idea power. If he were alive today, he’d be running for leadership of a nation.
Example 2: The Real Estate Agent Who Dominated with Words
Roy Brooks sold property in 1970s London through Sunday Times and Observer classifieds. While competitors wrote “charming Victorian home with original features,” Brooks wrote “Decaying pile suitable only for the desperate or demented.”
His brutal honesty became art. His ads were more famous than the houses. People bought newspapers to read his listings.
He dominated one of the most commoditized markets in existence through creative thinking alone.
Both examples predate AI by decades or centuries. But AI makes the pattern undeniable: ideas are the moat. Execution is table stakes.
The AI writing tool creators are celebrating execution in an era where execution is worthless.
The PayPal Blueprint: How Idea Division Beats Idea Sprawl
James Altucher breaks idea generation into five operations in his book, Skip the Line:
Idea addition: Combine concepts to create new categories
Idea subtraction: Remove elements to find essential core
Idea multiplication: Scale one insight across contexts
Idea division: Narrow scope to dominate a niche
Idea sex: Merge disparate concepts for breakthroughs
PayPal demonstrates idea division perfectly.
Peter Thiel’s team wanted to build universal web payments. Every website. Every transaction. Complete infrastructure.
Too broad. Too competitive. Too vague.
So they divided the idea ruthlessly. Instead of serving every website, they focused exclusively on eBay. Became the monopoly payment solution for one marketplace. Beat eBay’s internal competing tools through focus.
Then, they expanded their position to handle significant payment volume across the entire internet.
That’s not an execution story. The technical work of building payment infrastructure was hard but solvable. The idea to divide the market, dominate one segment, then expand was the breakthrough.
Strategy beats execution every time. And now AI handles execution.
The Uncomfortable Economics: Why Your Job Isn’t What You Think
Here’s what changed in the last 24 months:
Before: Content creation cost $5,000 and three weeks. Quality was scarce. Distribution was scarce. Execution was the bottleneck.
Now: Content creation costs $20 and one hour. Quality baseline is high. Distribution is accessible. Ideas are the bottleneck.
That’s the shift. Your job isn’t typing anymore. Your job is thinking.
Which means your value depends entirely on the quality of your thinking. And most people haven’t trained that muscle.
Why You Can’t Generate Ideas (and What to Do About It)
Most people generate ideas through:
Keyword research: SEO’s default for 20 years. Produces incremental content on existing topics. Safe. Boring. Undifferentiated.
Competitor analysis: Copying what works guarantees you’ll follow, never lead.
Platform trends: Chasing algorithm signals produces noise, not breakthroughs.
These methods generate ideas for content. They don’t generate ideas for value.
Real idea generation requires systematic input and processing.
Step 1: Consume Broadly
Read books outside your industry. Watch documentaries on unfamiliar subjects. Listen to podcasts in unrelated domains. Attend events that have nothing to do with your work.
Baron Munchausen combined travel adventure with absurdist fiction. Roy Brooks combined real estate with brutal honesty. Both created categories nobody else occupied because they pulled from disparate sources.
You can’t combine what you don’t consume.
Step 2: Process Actively
Don’t just consume—synthesize. Take notes. Ask questions. Look for patterns across unrelated fields. Use frameworks to force new combinations.
SCAMPER (Substitute, Combine, Adapt, Modify, Put to other uses, Eliminate, Reverse) systematically manipulates existing ideas into new ones.
Altucher’s idea calculus does the same—forcing you to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and combine concepts deliberately.
Step 3: Feed AI with Rich Context
The quality of AI output depends entirely on input quality.
Vague prompt: “Write about marketing.” Vague output: Generic marketing advice.
Rich prompt: “Combine Roy Brooks’ brutally honest 1970s real estate ads with modern B2B SaaS positioning to create a framework for authentic brand voice in commoditized markets.” Novel output: Actionable strategic framework.
AI amplifies your thinking. If your thinking is generic, your output is generic. If your thinking is creative, your output is a breakthrough.
Step 4: Generate Systematically
James Altucher recommends writing ten ideas every morning. Not ten good ideas. Just ten ideas.
Ten ways to improve your business. Ten newsletter topics. Ten solutions to a client problem. Ten ways to help your daughter’s school improve outcomes.
Most will be terrible. That’s the point. Idea muscles strengthen through use. Volume creates quality.
After 30 days, you’ve generated 300 ideas. Most are garbage. But 10 are interesting. And 2–3 are genuinely valuable.
That’s 2–3 valuable ideas you didn’t have 30 days ago. Compounding advantage.
The Books That Build Creative Thinking
Most people don’t know creative thinking can be learned. They think it’s innate talent.
Wrong. It’s a skill. These books teach it.
Must-Read Foundations
Make Brilliant Work by Rod Judkins — The creativity bible. Comprehensive, practical, immediately applicable.
Skip the Line by James Altucher — Idea calculus framework, becoming an idea machine, systematic generation.
Thinkertoys by Michael Michalko — Catalog of creative techniques with step-by-step instructions.
Decoding Greatness by Ron Friedman — Reverse engineers excellence to extract repeatable principles.
Supplemental Depth
Michael Michalko’s entire body of work on creative thinking. Multiple books with overlapping but distinct frameworks.
Study them. Practice the techniques. Build idea generation into your daily routine.
Modern education doesn’t teach this. Schools teach compliance, memorization, and standardized problem-solving. The opposite of creative thinking.
You’re responsible for learning it yourself.
Why Social Media Is Get-Rich-or-Lie-Trying (and What That Means)
We’re living through brutal economic times. UK productivity down. Energy prices crushing businesses. Interest rates killing growth. Economists arguing about solutions while the wealth gap expands.
Everyone’s hustling. Everyone’s posting their wins. Social media became “get rich or lie trying”—a phrase I’ve written about before.
Nobody’s posting creative solutions. Nobody’s sharing novel thinking. Everyone’s copying the same growth playbooks, the same content strategies, the same monetization models.
Which means creative thinkers have massive advantage. The bar is lower than it should be.
If the best idea established AI experts can generate is “build another LinkedIn automation tool,” you can win by thinking slightly harder than that.
We need people creating solutions to problems nobody’s articulated yet. Building categories that don’t exist. Combining concepts from unrelated fields.
That’s where value lives. Not in execution. In originality.
The Replacement Mechanism They’re Not Telling You
Everyone repeats: “You won’t be replaced by AI. You’ll be replaced by someone who knows how to use AI.”
That’s already wrong.
You won’t be replaced by someone who uses AI better. You’ll be replaced by someone who brings better ideas to AI.
The writing tool creators use AI. Everyone uses AI. That’s not differentiation. That’s baseline.
Differentiation is idea quality. The originality of your thinking. The combinations nobody else sees. The problems you articulate that others don’t notice.
Baron Munchausen had ridiculous ideas executed through oral storytelling. Roy Brooks had creative ideas executed through newspaper ads. Donald Trump had persuasive ideas deployed through mass media.
None had superior execution platforms. They had superior ideas.
That’s your only defensible advantage. The quality of ideas you generate and bring to AI.
Your Move
Write ten ideas tomorrow morning. Pick one. Spend 20 minutes with ChatGPT exploring it.
Repeat as often as you can, and you’ll start creating change in your world and those around you.
Andrew Holland
Originally published on LinkedIn on 10 November 2025.