Clear Thinking is the Top 1% Skill in the Age of AI

There’s a chain reaction most people miss: Clear thinking → Clear writing → Clear prompting Each step refines the one before it. Writing forces you to confront the gaps in your thinking. Prompting forces you to confront the gaps in your writing. AI amplifies whatever you input. Feed it muddy thinking, get muddy outputs. Feed it precision, get leverage. The Surplus of Competence We’re drowning in tools that enable a base level of competence. AI is one of them. Anyone can generate “pretty good” now - content, code, strategy, whatever. ...

January 19, 2026 · 2 min · Austin Johnson