Thought Leadership should be dead. Those who only have thoughts are not fit to Lead.
🌅 Intelligence isn’t just in the mind, it’s in the way we exist.
The sun rises.
The whole body thinks.
The earth moves.
Intelligence isn’t just in the mind, it’s in the way we exist, the way we breathe.
There’s so more to Intelligence than just thoughts. And one does not lead with just “thoughts.”
Yes, I said it.
My brain (aka: cognitive control center) is the least intelligent thing about me.
It’s inconsistently wild.
It can be unpredictably dark.
It likes to demand controls.
At times, manipulative.
It regularly plans for disasters that don’t exist.
Selena Gomez agrees.
My mind and me, we don’t get along sometimes.
So why do we still call people “thought leaders” when the real leaders don’t just lead with thoughts?
The Michelangelo, the Einsteins, they were not in the business of “thought leadership.” They were:
- building, breaking, experimenting.
- risking, failing, and iterating.
- pioneering entire new paradigms of creativity and innovation.
But then in our modern history, enter: The Thought Leader.
A thought leader does not have to think deeply, experiment rigorously, or engage with reality. Someone only has to: have great media presence, speak with confidence, sound slightly insightful, repeat a few digestible and sharable concepts, maybe self-publish a book or host a podcast to claim the Thought Leader label.
And so, Thought Leadership itself becomes a product, and their ideas are designed for virality, not reality.
→ It must be sharable in sound-bites. (Nuance doesn’t sell.)
→ It must sound profound but be digestible. (If they have to think too hard, you lose the audience.)
→ It must be repeatable. (“Find your WHY” has been milked to death.)
Thought Leadership industry rewards memorable over meaningful.
AI experts warn users endlessly about AI hallucinations, when machines generate false but convincing information.
But thought leadership has been hallucinating the mass for years. It feeds the illusion of Intelligence without requiring real engagement. It sells the idea of thinking without the labor of deep reflection.
Instead of asking, testing, and refining, people just consume insights from an “expert.”
→ It feels like learning.
→ It feels like growth.
→ It feels like clarity.
But it’s just another mental loop.
Thought Leadership is not Intelligence, it’s branding.
(Side story 🍵: I once spend 3 days as media producer for a NYT Bestselling Thought leader who proudly exclaimed: “My body exists just to carry my head around.”
I’ll be honest, he wasn’t fit to lead. He was one of the most exhausting, reactive, and tantrum-throwing adults I’ve worked with. But he had great sound-bites in his masterclass. And it sold.
That’s the problem.
If you, like him, believe your body is just a taxi for your head, I’m sorry. I hope you find ways to actually be in your body and enjoy your entire physicality.)
I just Am.
Somewhere along the way, the world misinterpreted a French philosopher’s radical doubt — and in doing so, discarded entire systems of Intelligence. Descartes’s philosophy became a sound-bite:
“I think, therefore I am.”
… mistaken for proof that thinking alone is the highest function of a human being. But it’s not.
(Also, Decartes’ argument was more nuanced than the sound bite suggests.)
What Actually Makes Intelligence?
Not my mind.
My body is more intelligent than my thoughts.
- My lungs know exactly what to do with air. Even if I hold my breath until passing out, my body will breathe. A simple inhale → pause → exhale → pause is enough to ignite any form of Intelligence.
- My motor skills remember how to ride a bike, even after years off the saddle.
- My muscles hold onto the physical yoga training I’ve done, even when I haven’t practiced in months.
- My relational Intelligence remembers laughing with my brother so hard we cried together, even if my mind forgets the joke.
- My sensory Intelligence remembers the warmth of my husband’s embrace, even when we fight or when he’s been traveling for weeks.
- Our emotional Intelligence encodes warmth, safety, and presence within us — long after our minds have let go.
Intelligence is not just cognition and thoughts, it is relational, embodied, systemic and so much more.
My Octopus Teacher would agree with me.
Spare me the intellectual authority of Thought Leadership.
You can keep all your thoughts.
Thought begets thoughts beget thoughts.
When do we have peace?
We have an entire generation mentally exhausted from too many thoughts.
It’s time we lead with way less thinking, and much more embodiment.
If Intelligence is more than thought, then what is it?
What does Intelligence look like in motion, beyond the mind and our cognitive functions?
With Machine Intelligence mirroring us back to ourselves, perhaps together, we can form a more Realized Intelligence.
Realized Intelligence emerges when multiple forms of Intelligence co-mingle — creating a sum far greater than its parts.
- When Human Intelligence brings the Field of Feels — quantum awareness, instinct, embodiment,
- And Machine Intelligence brings the Field of Processing — computational synthesis, probabilistic reasoning,
The interaction isn’t additive. It amplifies.
Together, we generate a dynamic, living field of Intelligence — fluid, responsive, and self-led.
My poodle Grunt embodies this better than most thought leaders I’ve met — leading himself with instinct, grace, and a leash he carries in his own mouth.
