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The first time I got AI to do something genuinely useful, I sat back in my chair and just looked at it.

It had taken a messy pile of notes and turned them into something I'd normally have lost an evening to. I remember thinking, quite clearly, that the job had changed.

Six months later I did something considerably harder and felt nothing at all.

Not disappointment. Just flat. The second thing was better than the first by a distance, and I didn't sit back in the chair. I saved it and opened the next thing.

I don't think that's a story about AI. I think it's a story about eggs.

Steven Bartlett tells one in The Diary of a CEO, and it has stuck with me. Early cake mixes were designed to be as easy as possible. Everything came in the box. Add water, stir, bake.

They didn't sell.

The fix was to take the dried egg out and make people crack a real one.

Nothing about the cake got better. What changed was that the person making it had done something.

Researchers eventually put a number on it. They gave people flat-pack furniture, some to assemble, some already built.

The ones who built it themselves would pay 63 per cent more for the same thing.

Effort doesn't only produce the object. It produces the attachment to it.

Which takes me back to my chair.

That first time, I wasn't watching a machine work. I was cracking an egg. I didn't know how to ask properly, the first two attempts came back useless, and I had to work out what I actually wanted before I could describe it to anything. That was the assembly. The satisfaction was mine because I'd built something, badly, and finished it.

Six months on I was fluent. I knew how to ask, so there was nothing left to work out. And when the fumbling went, the feeling went with it.

For a while I read that as a loss. Another bit of craft quietly automated away, another thing that used to feel like mine and now felt like a vending machine.

James Clear reframed it for me. His argument is that habits on their own never produce mastery. Old tasks get easier, he says, but it doesn't get easier overall, because you're now pouring that freed-up energy into the next challenge. Every skill you make automatic unlocks the next one.

The effort doesn't disappear when something becomes easy. It relocates.

I think the satisfaction relocates with it.

You stop being proud of what you made. You start being proud of what you can now make.

That flat feeling wasn't the work becoming meaningless. It was me still looking for the reward in the old place. The pride had moved to a different question, and I hadn't gone and looked there yet.

Because here is what was actually true that day. I had done something in an afternoon that I genuinely could not have done a year earlier. Not faster. Could not have done. Somewhere in six months of fumbling I'd become someone with a capability I didn't have before, and I was too busy being unimpressed by the output to notice the person holding it.

That is a much better thing to be proud of, and it's also the one nobody can take off you. The output is disposable. It gets superseded next week by something better. What you can now do travels with you into every piece of work after it.

None of which is new, and that's the part I missed for years. I had the same feeling long before any of these tools existed, the first time I properly handed over work I was good at. Someone else did it, it went perfectly well, and I got none of the satisfaction I used to get from doing it myself. I remember feeling faintly redundant and slightly guilty about feeling that way.

The pride was supposed to move then too. Off the task, and onto being someone who could build people capable of carrying it. I just hadn't been told that was the trade, so I read the quiet as a loss rather than as the next thing starting.

Every step up does this. You give away the work that made you feel useful, and there's a gap before the new satisfaction turns up somewhere further along.

You see the same pattern in teams. Give people work that turns up already decided and they'll deliver it and feel nothing much about it. Compliance is easy to get and it never turns into pride. Give them a real hand in shaping it and they start protecting the finish, because some part of it belongs to them.

The same rule holds either way. No egg, no ownership.

The flat feeling usually means the fumbling has stopped. Which is not a problem. It's a promotion.

MAKING IT HAPPEN: Your Weekly Strategy

Name the thing that has gone flat. The work you used to find satisfying and now simply get through.

Then ask honestly whether it became less meaningful, or whether you got better at it. It is nearly always the second, and flatness is just the sound of something turning automatic.

Which makes flatness a readiness signal rather than a warning. If something that used to stretch you no longer does, you have capacity sitting idle.

THIS WEEK ON LINKEDIN

A few things I published this week, if you want more between issues.

It's all a big dysfunction

The 5 buckets of career growth

Your plan isn't the outcome

Human in the loop delivery: an AI delivery guide

How to actually lead a team

How to own your week

CHEAT SHEETS

The free cheat sheet library is here. I'll keep adding to it. Save the link and grab whatever helps.

Share this with someone who has just handed over the work they were best at and can't quite say why it feels flat.

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Hit reply and tell me one thing you can do now that you couldn't do last year. I read every one.

Have a great week and speak soon,

Bilal