Ryan Hanley

And when things broke, I fixed them because I had the energy to diagnose the problem because I was operating in my easy mode.

Easy mode doesn't just make you more productive.

It makes you high agency by default.

Now, here's where this gets important for right now, this moment, for 2026, for the age of AI, because there is a conversation happening everywhere about AI, and most of it is missing the point entirely.

Most people are using AI to go faster, faster emails, faster content, faster reports, faster presentations.

And I want to be direct with you here.

That is the low agency move unequivocally and undoubtedly if you are in hard mode, disconnected, depleted, reorganizing folders, writing emails that don't that shouldn't even exist.

And you give that person an AI tool.

You don't get high agency person automatically.

You get a low agency person trying to produce work slop at machine speed because they feel like that's what they're supposed to be doing.

The real play, the one almost no one else is executing is using AI to protect your easy mode.

This AI was built to protect your easy mode, to protect that thing that when you do it, it looks like cheating to everyone else.

AI protects easy mode, not to produce more,

to eliminate everything that pulls you away from your zone of genius, where you produce disproportionate results, results that look like cheating to everyone else.

Let me show you exactly what I mean.

I run a podcast, Finding Peak.

It's part of this YouTube channel.

We do over 200,000 downloads a month.

And one of the biggest drains on my time, one of the things that was consistently pulling me out of my easy mode

was managing inbound guest requests.