The future belongs to the problem solvers—the entrepreneurs, marketers, and leaders who connect the dots others don’t even see. The people who:

• Are able to seemingly create value out of thin air, driven by a vision of what’s possible.
• Consistently overcome the types of obstacles that stop everyone else in their tracks.
• Recognize that groupthink is usually the opposite of wisdom, and that the status quo is a trap that inevitably leads to stagnation.

Clinging to yesterday’s answers, or refusing to question today’s “best practices,” is a guaranteed path to failure. As comforting as it might be to think we know what will work tomorrow, we all live in the same world of unrelenting and constant change.

Your company will face new competitive threats, innovative startups and technologies, shifting economic and market conditions, and other forces that will quickly make today’s most creative solutions completely obsolete.

Your role will also continue to shift as more of your day-to-day tasks are handed off to automation tools. Business or career success will no longer come down to how fast or efficiently you’re able to work, since the software designed to do most of that work will always be able to do it more quickly.

If we’re going to continue to thrive as productive and creative individuals, we need to start questioning our entire perception of productivity as a concept. We need to let go of the idea that the value of our work is based on our ability to “get more done and get it done faster.” And we need to embrace the possibility that our greatest contributions as human beings (at least in our work lives) will no longer be measured in keystrokes or hours spent on Zoom calls.

In a progressively automated workplace, we need to measure the value of our work by the quality of our ideas, our insights, and our solutions to the types of problems that only human creativity can produce. Our productivity can’t and won’t be based on output of units, as if our minds and bodies are somehow just fleshy factories.

Our contribution will be based on our impact. Our ability to think. Our ability to tap into our uniquely human point of view and discover solutions to really hard problems.

The good news is that you and I are natural problem solvers. We’ve all experienced those “a-ha!” moments when everything just seems to click.

But like any skill, we’ll lose it if we don’t use it. And yet we seem to be going out of our way to do just that. Instead of maximizing our problem-solving potential, we’ve built systems that reward us for doing as little deep thinking as possible.

Consider our typical corporate culture. Are we encouraged to stop and think? To carve out chunks of uninterrupted, focused time to do our actual work? To create the space we need to come up with real solutions to our most pressing problems?

Of course not. We’re rewarded for doing the type of work that makes us look busy.

We’re incentivized to:

• Respond as quickly as possible to every Slack message and internal email thread, regardless of its importance or relationship to high-priority goals…
• (Attempt to) multi-task during Zoom meetings or while doing our actual work, even though that means we’re not doing any of it very well…
• Always have more on our plates than we can really handle—and be sure that everyone else knows how busy we are—yet be willing to say yes when asked to take on even more…

…because these activities make it look like we’re actually doing something.

But stopping to think? That doesn’t look like real work.

Of course, it is the real work. And to do it well, we need to start giving ourselves permission to do it wholeheartedly. We need to stop hiding behind busywork, allowing a toxic hustle-driven business culture to make us feel unworthy if we’re not constantly grinding ourselves down to a dull nub.

We have a choice. On one side, we can stay trapped by the status quo bias and groupthink that reward busyness over impact.

Or we can choose to take back control of our own moment-to-moment lives, and wake up to our true productive potential so we can start creating a future we actually want to live in.