Ghosts in My Notebooks, 0 to 1 thinking, and how I have moved past these.
Yesterday, I conducted a mini workshop for a top-tier branding agency that, to be honest, was struggling to leverage Gen AI tools in a business with a significant track record of work in Asia, which has stood the test of time. They have worked on some of the region’s most iconic and evergreen brands, but now, faced with such a dynamically changing landscape, they felt a bit frozen in time.
The very first thing I wrote on the whiteboard was this:
That note is important to me because it captures two very different conditions of thinking. When I think about the work I need to do, one of the habits I have is to understand “where” the work is positioned.
Why 0 → 1 and 2 → 10 Are Not the Same
Zero to one is the hardest leap. It’s the blank page. The wide-open horizon. No guardrails, no precedents, no clarity. It’s exhilarating because anything is possible, but it’s also daunting because nothing is defined. This is where you stare at the blue ocean and try to imagine where the first island might rise. Zero to one requires imagination, courage, and the willingness to step into uncertainty.
Two to ten is something else entirely. By the time you’re here, the landscape has changed. You’re no longer facing a horizon of pure possibility. You’re standing on some kind of foundation. You’ve got guardrails. You have a point of view. You know at least a little about the direction you’re moving in. Now the challenge isn’t invention, it’s progression. The work becomes about building, refining, pressure testing, and intentionally moving toward a goal.
For me, this distinction matters because the way I work with AI changes at each stage. In zero-to-one thinking, I use AI as a spark to surface patterns, generate first frames, or just begin somewhere, anywhere. In two-to-ten thinking, I use it as a partner in iteration, stress-testing the idea, poking at weak points, or suggesting new angles I hadn’t considered. The prompting shifts because the mindset shifts. At zero to one, the prompt is exploratory. At two to ten, it’s directional.
The difference and approach are profound: in one stage, you’re searching for the edges of possibility. In the other, you’re deliberately shaping what you already know is there.
Triage.
The word triage comes from medicine. Picture an emergency room after a major accident, when too many patients arrive at once. Doctors don’t start with treatment; they begin with sorting. Who needs immediate attention? Who can safely wait? Who, painfully, cannot be helped at all? It’s a system born not of choice, but of necessity, when resources are limited and demands are overwhelming.
Triage is how you create clarity.
I’ve come to see my backlog of ideas in the same way. Each note, each half-formed thought, each line jotted in a margin is like a patient arriving at the door. Not all can or should be saved. The real discipline lies in deciding which deserve immediate energy, which can be deferred, and which should be released entirely.
My notebooks, files, and calendars are full of ghosts. Little fragments of ideas that were important enough to capture in the moment, but not urgent enough to bring to life. “Explore normalized conditions for clean air.” “Sketch an idea for a podcasting point of view.” “Research long-term shifts in Gen Z leisure.” They sit there, waiting, not quite tasks, not quite projects. Just notes.
The reason they die isn’t because they’re bad ideas. It’s because of the cost of starting. To take a hint of an idea from nothing to something requires a surge of energy: finding the right frame, pulling together the context, sketching a structure, and making the first judgment call. A blank page is heavy, not because it’s empty, but because it demands everything all at once. So I procrastinate. Not out of laziness, but because the leap from zero to one is so expensive that it’s easier to defer it until later. Later, of course, seldom comes.
Over the past year, I’ve noticed that this equation has changed. Generative AI tools have collapsed the slope of the hill. The little fragments that once languished on my lists can now cross the 0–1 barrier in minutes. A vague question becomes a rough survey of the field. A half-note becomes a structured outline. An idle thought becomes a list of sharp, provocative questions that frame the problem more clearly. Suddenly, the blank page isn’t blank anymore.
That is a real benefit of AI. It isn’t simply productivity. It’s clarity and momentum.
Not 0 → 1, but 0 → 5
Today, my work doesn’t end at one. What I’ve found most valuable is pushing these scraps a little further, to what I think of as the “zero to five” threshold. At five, an idea has just enough shape to be judged. It’s not a finished essay or a polished strategy. It’s a sketch, a rough scaffolding you can look at and say, yes, this is worth climbing, or no, this should be left behind. That moment of judgment is crucial. Before, many ideas died in limbo simply because I couldn’t find the time or space to start them. Now, with AI, they at least reach the proving ground. Some go forward, some get discarded, but either way, they don’t haunt the list forever.
It’s important to be clear: AI is less useful in the later stages. Taking something from five to ten is where craft takes over, where judgment and storytelling matter more than speed. I don’t outsource this to AI. But by then, the runway is clear. My energy is only spent on what actually deserves the lift.
From Efficiency to Curation
What this signals to me is a new way of working. Imagine if we treated AI not primarily as a finisher, but as a starter. Suppose the role of these tools was not to automate output, but to surface and stress-test ideas before they’re forgotten. A strategist could turn a fleeting hunch into a framework worth debating. A researcher could spin a cryptic question into an opening scan. A brand manager could take a vague to-do and see it evolve into the bones of a brief. None of these would be finished, but all of them would be started.
The breakthrough is not efficiency, but curation. By moving more things into that middle state, we give ourselves a clearer sense of what deserves our scarce attention, in a way, adopting a more editorial discipline - pursuing leads, discarding dead ends, and doubling down on the stories that matter.
I’ve come to think of it this way: AI won’t do the work for me. But it ensures that my initial ideas become more well-formed, and I can then decide where my time and my real value - my experience, judgment, and POV - are applied.
Two States of Thinking, One Common Mistake
When I left that workshop yesterday, I kept thinking about how even the best, most established agencies can freeze when the landscape shifts. This was a world-class team with a portfolio that has shaped some of Asia’s most iconic brands. And yet the conversation we had could be summed up in those two sketches on the whiteboard: 0 → 1 and 2 → 10.
What struck me was not that they lacked talent or ambition. It was that they hadn’t yet split their own work into those two states of thinking. They were trying to solve every problem the same way, without realizing that the conditions of zero to one are nothing like the conditions of two to ten. Multiply that by the amount of noise the industry generates for itself; every day, a new tool, new feature, new guru writing about hacks, plug-ins, APIs, and models. Like many others in the industry, they were slowed down by trying to figure out what works for them in their environment.
Trying to Catch the Wind
Chasing tools is like trying to catch the wind. You can’t. There will always be another launch, another plug-in, another “must-have” feature. The point isn’t to evaluate every new tool. The point is to understand where you are in your process, and then use the tools you already have as multipliers to get you across the right threshold. Sometimes that means sparking a start, getting from zero to one. Sometimes it means pushing further, getting to five, where there’s enough substance on the bones to decide if it’s worth taking all the way to ten.
That’s the real opportunity here. Not speed for its own sake. Not automation. But clarity. A deliberate way of working that allows us to experiment more freely, filter more rigorously, and bring our judgment to bear where it counts.
At the end of the day, Gen AI is just a chatbot. It’s an input field. The leverage comes not from the machine, but from the human who faces it. The more experienced you are, the more you’ve lived through, the more valuable your thinking becomes at the moment before you type. That is what no tool can replace.
So the shift is simple but profound: stop chasing the tools. Start sharpening the questions. Know whether you’re standing at zero or at two, whether you’re staring at a blank horizon or building on a foundation. Then use AI to accelerate the step you need most. If you do that, you’ll find that the ghosts in your notebook don’t stay ghosts for long.
A Final Note:
One of the participants in the workshop inquired about classes, courses, or specific actions she could take to enhance her work with AI. My answer may have surprised her.
Read more. Explore more.
Learn about the world we live in, the people who make up cultures, and the literature that has carried our histories, our behaviours, our humanity. Spend less time reading about AI, and more time reading about people - how we think, act, and feel. Learn about belief structures, favorite foods, and the music that defines our summers.
The tools will change. The text prompt window is giving way to voice. Image as input is already established. Scribbled notes on video frames are already being used as a way of modifying GenAI outputs. Gesture may follow. The interface is in flux, but the human questions remain the same.
Becoming a student of the humanities is the most important education you can acquire today. Because the better you understand people, the better you will understand what to ask of the machine.
In the end, it is the quality of our questions, not the novelty of our tools, that will define the work we create.
This week, take three ghost notes from your notebook. Push each from zero to five with AI. Then decide: build or bin. That’s how clarity starts.
I run workshops for agencies and brands that want to stop chasing the latest AI plug-in and start rethinking how they approach problems, culture, and creativity. It’s not about the tools. It’s about how we think with them.
And if you need something to read...