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Maps and models for Solo Chiefs navigating sole accountability in the age of AI.
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The more ‘up-to-date’ you are, the more replaceable you become. Tool mastery is the wrong game.
Technostress and FOBO aren’t helping you win. When Google launches 3 new tools tomorrow, your competitive advantage is calmness.
So ... Anthropic came out with Claude 4.6 and OpenAI released GPT-5.3-Codex. This came just after a week of hype around Moltbook, the social media platform for AI agents, which followed the Clawdbot/Moltbot/OpenClaw phenomenon, the open source tool that got renamed twice during a coffee break.
All of that happened as I was watching videos about Google’s Opal, Antigravity and AI Studio tools. I thought, “Let’s narrow down the noise. I’ve got everything in Google Workspace, so I’ll focus only on Google’s tools for now.”
But then Daria Cupareanu published a list of 36 AI tools available from Google.
Thirty-six. Just from Google. 😵💫
They probably launched half of those as I was having another coffee, trying not to look anxious.
You may recognize the feeling: technostress. FOBO—Fear Of Becoming Obsolete. These were just two of the 250+ terms listed in my AI Glossary for 2026.
This needs to stop.
I’ve got a life, you know.
I’d like to enjoy it without the perpetual feeling that I’m always falling behind.
So I did something slightly absurd. I asked the cause of my technostress (the major AI labs, through ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude) for advice on how to deal with FOBO. Then I made these culprits debate each other. After all, it’s only fair that the offenders (the reasons behind my anxiety) help me craft a strategy for dealing with it. (You’ll find the full debate in the appendix below.)
Why AI Tool Overload Is a Nervous System Problem
ChatGPT named what’s actually happening to me: continuous partial activation. I’m subscribed to 100+ Substack newsletters around AI, which means my brain gets yanked from ‘this looks interesting’ to ‘maybe relevant’ mode twenty times a day. There’s no closure. No return on investment. Just an endless stream of alerts, launches, renames, hot takes, overviews, and summaries.
ChatGPT said my nervous system is under DDoS attack.
Indeed, I’ve felt this clearly. Every new tool announcement triggers the same response: a small spike of anxiety followed by the urge to investigate. Multiply that by thirty announcements per week, and I’m not learning, I’m shaking. I’m doomscrolling across my To Do list as if it’s LinkedIn’s news feed.
The Counterintuitive Truth About AI Tool Mastery
Gemini doubled down on this with an uncomfortable provocation: The more ‘up-to-date’ I am, the more replaceable I become. If my value is knowing the latest features of Claude Cowork, I’m exactly as valuable as a $20/month subscription.
Nothing deprecates faster than AI knowledge. What’s interesting today is irrelevant tomorrow. The last thing you want as a Solo Chief is spending half your time absorbing information that’ll get overwritten the next week.
In eighteen years of my writing, training, and speaking, the peers who commanded premium rates weren’t the ones who knew every tool, model and framework. Sure, they were aware of what was happening around them. They roughly knew the terrain. But they were also the ones who could calmly say, “These are the tools you don’t need. And here’s the strategy that actually matters.”
That’s leadership territory and critical thinking.
A Strategy for Dealing with FOBO and AI Overwhelm
After two rounds of AI sparring (with escalating snark from Gemini), here’s what emerged. Claude suggested calling it the FOBO Firewall:
First, know your tech adoption role. Are you an explorer testing new territory, a pioneer building the first solutions, or a settler optimizing proven ground? Most Solo Chiefs should probably be settlers with occasional pioneer excursions. Explorers are on a special mission that only few of us can afford to be on.
Second, understand your objective. What problem does your single wringable neck actually depend on solving? If you don’t know your Job-to-Be-Done, you can’t know when a technology deserves your attention and when you can safely ignore it.
Third, adopt a lag preference. Trail the hype by six months. Maybe twelve. When you work as a settler rather than an explorer, the bugs are cheaper, the documentation exists, the bullshit’s been filtered, and the best practices have emerged. And you can easily see which tools are still standing and which have evaporated. (Anyone remember Bard? ChatGPT plug-ins? Windows Recall?)
Fourth, track value density. Gemini suggested measuring your revenue per tool. A Solo Chief with five tools and a $200k run rate is a genius. Someone with thirty-six tools and a $50k revenue stream is mostly an underpaid beta tester for Big Tech.
Fifth, prove the negative. Once a month, review everything you ignored. Notice that nothing collapsed. Nothing got replaced. Your nervous system needs to learn that stillness isn’t decay. Meditation has value. In the age of AI, calmness is a unique selling point.
Notice what’s missing from this list: any advice about which tools to pick. That’s the point. A firewall doesn’t choose your furniture—it decides what gets through the door.
In the age of AI, calmness is a unique selling point
This is the hardest part. When you’re the single wringable neck, stillness feels like negligence. Every tool you don’t evaluate feels like a risk you didn’t manage. But the r