For a century, work rewarded people who could package ideas neatly. AI makes packaging free, and that changes who gets ahead.

Everyone is asking who AI will replace. Almost nobody is asking the better question: Who will AI release?

It will release the person whose mind produces 10 ideas before breakfast and loses eight by lunch. The person who sees connections nobody else in the room sees but cannot get them into a memo anyone will read. The person who has heard “so much potential, if you could get organized” in every performance review of their career.

For 100 years, the modern workplace sorted people on one dominant trait. It wasn’t intelligence, creativity or judgment. It was the ability to convert thought into tidy, linear output, on schedule and in the right format. If you could do that, you advanced. If you couldn’t, the quality of your thinking never mattered, because nobody saw it.

I have spent decades building software companies, and the pattern held in every one. The most original minds I worked with were rarely the most organized. They thought in webs, not lines. They could hold an entire system in their heads and still miss the status meeting about it. The promotions went to the people who wrote clean documents and answered email in order.

Entrepreneurship has always drawn heavily from these minds. Michael Freeman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco, found that 29% of the entrepreneurs he studied reported ADHD .

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