How do I use AI to grow without turning it into a crutch?

What a crutch really is

A crutch is not a bad tool. It is a good tool that you can no longer put down. The difference is not in the tool but in the default. When the first thing you do with every question is reach for the tool, the tool has stopped being a choice.

That is the territory The New Top 10% works in. The free chapters do not mention AI chatbots. They are about defaults: what happens to a person when the feed, the algorithm and the phone decide what comes next. AI assistants are one more thing that can become a default, so the book's reasoning carries over. This post is our reading of that reasoning, not a quotation about AI.

Why defaults get stronger when we are tired

Move III makes a point that is easy to miss. For a long time, managing choices meant weighing alternatives carefully. Today, because of digital overload, the book says, the default carries decisive weight: we are too exhausted to look for alternatives, so we tend to settle for whatever is put in front of us.

The book quotes the management thinker Peter Drucker on why this matters now. For the first time, substantial and rapidly growing numbers of people have choices, and for the first time they will have to manage themselves. A tool that answers instantly makes it very easy to stop managing yourself.

The book is not against tools

It is worth being fair to the book. Move IX says that automatically picking every suggestion the algorithm gives during the day is not necessarily bad in itself. It also says that quitting everything is not a realistic answer for most people, and that someone who cuts off completely is only swapping one default for another: instead of "always with me", it becomes "never".

Its example is the musician Ed Sheeran, who stepped away from his phone, email and social media in 2015, then moved his email to an iPad and in 2021 bought a basic Nokia so he could be reached. Total refusal did not last, and the book's lesson is that either extreme leaves out the moment of conscious choice.

Applied to AI, the same lesson says: neither "never use it" nor "always ask it first" is a decision. Both are defaults.

A conscious moment between you and the tool

Move IX describes what it calls the crossing interval. At a threshold, you shift into neutral for a moment and choose, rather than letting habit choose. The book builds this around the doorway and the phone, but the structure is general: a marked moment, a nudge, a choice that is yours.

Here is one way to apply it, as our suggestion and not a rule from the book.

1. Name the job first. Before opening the tool, say in one sentence what you want from it. If you cannot, you are reaching out of habit.
2. Make the first attempt yourself. Not always, but often enough that the skill stays yours: a rough outline, a first guess, a first line.
3. Use the tool to widen, not to replace. Ask it for alternatives to your idea, not for the idea.
4. Finish with your own pass. The last word on anything that carries your name should be yours.

None of these forbids anything. They add a pause where a reflex used to be.

Be your own Metator

Move III borrows a Roman figure, the Metator, who walked ahead of the army and marked the ground where the camp would stand. The book says today's algorithm works as a dynamic digital Metator, redrawing the coordinates of your reality in real time. Its warning is short: there is no vacuum. If you do not set your own north, someone else will set the limits of what you do.

For AI use, setting your own north means deciding in advance which kinds of thinking stay with you: the judgment about what matters, the taste, the final decision. Hand off drafts and lookups if you like. Keep the direction.

A small daily practice from the book

Move III suggests one small exercise: leave the phone outside the bathroom, the one place we go into alone, and make a space with no phone and no book either. Be with yourself. Be the Metator at least once a day.

It sounds unrelated, and it is the point. A few minutes a day in which nothing answers for you is how you notice whether your own thinking is still switched on.

What this does not promise

The book does not claim to have studied AI assistants, and this post does not either. It offers no number about how many people over-rely on them. What it offers is a way of looking: ask who set the default, and keep a moment between you and the tool in which the choice is yours.

If that frame is useful, the preface and the first two chapters of The New Top 10%, by Dr. Yaacov Tzori and Beeri Tzori, are free to read: read the first chapters.