Be Harris Tweed in The World of AI

Every few decades, a story quietly reminds us that the future doesn’t only belong to the fastest technology, it belongs to the irreplaceable. One of those stories comes from an unlikely place: the remote Scottish islands where Harris Tweed was on the brink of extinction. The craft was aging out, the knowledge was evaporating, and the world was moving on to cheaper, faster, synthetic everything.

Then someone stepped in, not with nostalgia, but with a strategy. They didn’t try to compete with mass production. They repositioned authenticity as luxury. They built apprenticeships so knowledge transferred instead of disappearing. They protected the craft legally so corporations couldn’t dilute it. They modernized just enough to sustain the makers without erasing what made the product matter. And suddenly, a dying industry became a thriving one.

The lesson for entrepreneurs in 2026 is sharp:
In a world racing to automate itself, the advantage isn’t always being more “AI.” It’s being more you.

Harris Tweed didn’t survive because it became more efficient. It survived because it became more essential. Your moat in the AI era might not be speed, it might be specificity. It might be originality, community, craft, story, taste, judgment, or the piece of your work that can’t be templated or mass-generated.

As AI commoditizes the generic, the premium shifts to the authentic.

This week, ask yourself:
What is the Harris Tweed of your business, the part so rooted in craft, context, or culture that automation can support it, but never replace it?

That’s where your edge lives. And that’s what the world will pay for next.

Featured Story:

Over the past few months, I’ve noticed a quiet but unmistakable shift among the wealthiest and sharpest operators I’ve met: they’re switching back to flip phones. Not as a fashion statement, not because they’re anti tech, but because they’ve realized that the most expensive thing a smartphone consumes isn’t time, it’s attention. I’ve sat in rooms where everyone at the table had more money, access, and influence than most people could imagine… and every single one of them pulled out a button phone. When I asked why, the answer was disarmingly simple: “Every notification is someone else steering my mind.”

It hit me how right they were. Our phones have turned into attention sieves, buzzing, pinging, pulling at our focus until our thinking becomes reactive instead of intentional. And every entrepreneur knows this: the quality of your decisions determines the trajectory of your business. Once your attention fractures, decision making collapses. That’s why these ultra high performers don’t let algorithms script their mental state. Their assistants handle the screens; they protect the thinking. Several told me that removing the smartphone from their daily life lowered anxiety, sharpened their judgment, and helped them finally hear their own thoughts again.

I’m not telling you to go buy a flip phone. But in a world engineered to hijack your focus, the real power move is digital minimalism, choosing what earns your attention instead of letting everything demand it. Curate your feeds for signal, mute the noise, set boundaries around notifications, and treat your mind as the scarce resource it is. If there’s one common trait I’ve noticed among people playing the game at the highest level, it’s this: they guard their attention like wealth. And for entrepreneurs, that’s not just a mindset, it’s a competitive advantage.

Quick Wins: Recommendations & Discoveries

Book | The Social Life of Information 

The Book & The Lesson
What it is: A deceptively overlooked classic by John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid that most people think is “about knowledge management” but is actually about something far more useful for founders: how real organizations behave beneath the surface. Brown & Duguid reveal that people don’t follow processes, documents, or systems the way leaders imagine, they follow stories, informal networks, and the invisible practices that never get written down.

The Lesson: Startups rarely fail because they lack information. They fail because they misunderstand how humans work with information. The book breaks down why dashboards get ignored, why internal documentation goes stale instantly, and why teams organize around trust and shared experience, not your beautifully architected SOPs. It’s a masterclass in understanding the difference between how your company looks on paper and how it actually operates.

Why Founders Need It
If you’re scaling, this book exposes a critical blind spot: your systems will only work if they align with the social fabric of your team. The Social Life of Information helps you design tools, rituals, and workflows that people will naturally adopt, because they fit the way humans actually share knowledge. It teaches you how to build culture and operations that survive growth, onboarding, and complexity rather than collapsing under them.

Tool | Environmental Prompts (From Cognitive Ergonomics Research)

Most productivity frameworks rely on reminders, dashboards, or motivational nudges. Environmental prompts take a completely different approach: instead of pushing people, they shape the environment so that desired behaviors emerge automatically.

What It Is
Environmental prompts are subtle contextual cues embedded into a physical workspace or digital product that guide action without explicit instruction. They’re a core concept in cognitive ergonomics, normally applied to aviation or control rooms, but they’re a secret weapon for founders building teams and products that scale smoothly.

Why It Matters for Entrepreneurs
As your company grows, you can’t rely on individual discipline or micromanagement. You need environments where the “correct” behavior is also the easiest behavior.

My Favorite Examples:

• A metrics screen mounted in a shared space so data becomes part of daily conversation, not a buried tab.

• Default templates that auto encode best practices, so new hires follow standards without training.

• Product UX arranged so the path you want users to take is the path of least friction.

Environmental prompts shift your role from “managing people” to designing conditions where good decisions happen by default.

Contrarian Corner | Life’s Not Fair. Stop Crying about it.

Do this exercise. Write down the worst thing that’s ever happened to YOU.

You have two ways to look at it…

Victim Mindset (things happen to me)
Responsible Mindset (I am responsible for how I interpret & respond to this)

Now, re-write the story, but now taking 100% responsibility for how you interpreted, and responded to what happened. Trust me, this is going to be the freest you have ever been. The same rule applies to your actions in business.

Life is unfair to all of us. A little to some, a lot to others. At a certain age, it is your duty to heal and grow.

Community Spotlight - What you must understand

As you build for multiple audience, know your community. It is critical to understand what works for one, may not work for the other, so build with the right rails to be successful vs being judgmental and loosing your opportunity.

Thought of the Week: Build the Right IT

As Google’s first engineering director, Alberto Savoia led the team that launched Google’s revolutionary AdWords project. After founding two startups, he returned to Google in 2008 and he assumed the role of “Innovation Agitator,” developing trainings and workshops to catalyze smart, impactful creation within the company. Drawing on his book The Right It, he begins with the premise that at least 80 percent of innovations fail, even if competently executed. He discusses how to reframe the central challenge of innovation as a question not of skill or technology, but of market demand: Will anyone actually care? Savoia shares strategies for winning the fight against failure, by using a rapid-prototyping technique he calls “pretotyping." Ive shared pretotyping in the past, but I feel it is the right time to revisit it now.

Better Outcomes to all…

-Faizan…